Serif has updated Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher to version 2.6.4 with a lengthy list of bug fixes. The release resolves misplacement of odd page numbers when exporting Photoshop PSD and Affinity files to PDF as All Pages, fixes a bug that caused master page pasteboard content to disappear from the page, addresses a crash when sliding through History after adding extra pages, ensures that the independent baseline grid is scaled correctly, and fixes a bug that could render text at a different size when switching documents. (Affinity Designer, $69.99 new; Affinity Photo, $69.99; Affinity Publisher, $69.99; all three are available separately or together for $164.99 from Serif and are also available individually from the Mac App Store; free updates, various sizes, release notes, macOS 10.15+)
It’s important to note that you cannot buy the desktop versions of these apps currently. This update is only available to existing users of the apps. Serif has temporarily shut down their web store and removed the apps from the Mac App Store, with a note on their web page indicating something new is coming October 30, likely a version 3.0 upgrade.
The iPad versions of all three apps are still available, and currently can be downloaded and registered at no cost. Why Serif chose to do this for the iPad versions and not the Mac versions is not known.
I have bought and struggled with Publisher several times. It has one problem that has been hollered about by users from its first appearance. If you import a PDF created with another app that has hyperlinks and then save that file, your links will be deleted. Serif knows about this; it has been shown over and over in the community, and they never changed it. I suspect the new creation will focus on AI, and the hyperlink issue will remain along with others.
They also put their support forums into read-only mode on Oct 6th — that did not go down well, moreso because they’ve switched to using Discord instead.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the “Freedom” they’ve promised on the 30th doesn’t turn out to mean “Freemium” as in free to use but some features require a subscription. I know a lot of folks moved to Affinity because it wasn’t a subscription service.
Discord? No thanks! Too many companies are going that route. Skylum closed their user group, which was quite active, and moved to Facebook and Twitter. Not many of us were pleased with that. This move by Affinity/Serif will likely kill any interest I had remaining. The other issue aside from the hyperlinks that I spoke of yesterday is a persistent issue with misidentifying fonts. Publisher would misidentify a font in a document or would say the font was not in your system. It was in the system, but Publisher couldn’t identify it. Of course they offered a font package for purchase to solve all your problems… useless if there wasn’t a font like the one you had previously used.
The only silver lining is that the Affinity forums are still accessible as a read-only archive, for now. I know there are a few unofficial forums that folks were moving to — like you, they didn’t want to use Discord. I completely understand why — it’s great for chatting, but it’s no substitute for a support website. Unfortunately, the trend seems to be to make that Someone Else’s Problem to run, Discord is just the hip thing to offload that work onto.
Definitely prefer Discourse over Discord for fora, Realmac and the Agenda teams use it for their support.
The Affinity Suite and team was bought by Canva, I had presumed the update which they seem pretty pumped about will involve that somehow, or at least make sense of their relationship.
I wonder if the Serif apps will survive or if they will become muted amalgams of Canva. I suspect the buy-and-own-forever is about to vanish, and a subscribe-till-you-die will be enacted.
The way of things it seems. I’m already over subscribed to too many things. My College pays for my Creative Cloud thank goodness but my Capture One subscription will roll around in a few weeks, that’s 250 or so for a year. I did like to pace out my upgrading according to need and my budget but that’s increasingly being taken away.
I just checked and there was a minor update for my Affinity Designer 2 from 2.6.4 to 2.6.5. This update fixes two issues that were introduced with Tahoe. The update installed successfully and Designer works fine. This is NOT the new version that is all three apps in one.
I know a lot of folks moved to Affinity because it wasn’t a subscription service.