Hopefully this will allow the Serif team to improve their products. I bought their products from day one with the hope they would get better but after 10 years or so I'm still on Adobe.
It’s hard to sell an entire industry on replacing tools that “just work” with a new set of tools unless they actually work better. Consider what VS Code has had to do to try and get devs switch to it from other IDEs: they had to offer first-class support for pretty much every other IDE’s method of operating, e.g. plugins to take the keyboard shortcuts from other IDEs, plus offer better support for languages (e.g. LSPs, use of TextMate bundles), and on top of that offer new features not seen elsewhere (e.g. devcontainers, web-based IDEs, first-class GitHub integration…) and even then people will obviously still pick JetBrains products for Java or Python because you can’t actually copy every feature and win.
Likewise it only took me 5-10 minutes with Publisher before I started noticing missing features with text (Adobe has an excellent text rendering engine, go figure) and Designer in v1 was so frustrating that I haven’t used v2 much, though my use cases were pretty specific. I’ve actually found myself putting up with the bugs in OmniGraffle (oh so many bugs) because the infinite canvas there works so well when zooming around. When it works, that is.
Got a bit sidetracked in my answer, but Adobe has a lot going for it. Honestly this is probably great news for Figma, as they have an opportunity now to build better web-based photo and publishing apps before Canva can figure it out.
Affinity deals with boolean operations in different way Figma/Sketch/Glyphs also dont have pathfinder. They probably added it for some edgecases and because its easier for illustrator users to switch.
Publisher has pretty much same type tools as Indesign only the panels/features are positioned differently. Publisher doesnt have multi-line composer but that is paradoxically not used in professional setting anyway (its great for quick things though).
On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability,speed,connection between the software.
It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
> On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability, speed, connection between the software.
I think others would argue on that last point that Adobe is more than halfway there since Creative Suite and has plans to finish the job with Adobe Express, though we’ll see if they come to fruition.
> It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
This I agree with, 100%. And now Affinity will have a third struggle in that they are poised to go subscription and lose the pricing model advantage too. Even if they don’t change the pricing model, eventually you’ll need a Canva account to use the apps, ongoing annual support fees, and so on.
Maybe it is your particular needs, but so far I have been very impressed by the Affinity suite. I render from Blender in open exr, place in an AP document which I then place in a AP document. When I update the render, the whole pipeline is updated. This preservation of high dynamic range info would be impossible in the Adobe Suite.
I think that this is possible because under the hood the Affinity Suite uses the same core engine. In contrast, Adobe bought their suite from diverse sources, and interplay between them is clunky at best.
I agree that text preview in AP can be rough, but the output in pdf is as good as that in InDesign.
