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Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

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Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#101

Post by vetinari »

freedomben wrote: post #8
t-writescode wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as someone that's been very happy with the Affinity Suite and am scared of any major changes to them, this is pretty scary to me, as well. Reminds me of when Jasc was bought by Corel waaaay back in the day. Canva, if you're on HN, seeing how we're going to respond, please don't take away the stand-alone, non-subscription-based, affordable system that Affinity's products are. I love their products. I don't want…

Hate to say it, but a subscription model is coming. Canva is making money hands over fist by doing that, and I can't imagine they are going to part from what has been so lucrative

With perpetual license, they were getting some money from me for each major release. With subscription, they are going to get exactly 0.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#102

Post by vetinari »

omnimus wrote: post #69
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. There is absolutely 0 reason to use Affinity of Adobe besides pricing model. They can play around with the numbers and try to have a cheaper subscription than Adobe, or maybe bundle it with the other software Canva offers, but ultimately I think switching to a subscription model will be the end of the Affinity software suite.

Have you tried Affinity? The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace. Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed. The reason why everyone hates th…

Affinity (Photo) still doesn't support tablets properly. You can play around with parameters affected by pressure and tilt, but here Adobe (and Krita) are ahead.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#103

Post by rpastuszak »

rcarmo wrote: post #93

Oh boy. I willingly gave my money to Affinity because I don’t want a subscription model, I don’t want my creative apps to rely on the cloud _at all_ to work _and_ I want native Mac apps. I am not reassured by their FAQ at all. I suspect a year from now Canva will break at least one (if not all three) of these features and force me to leave Affinity by version 3. It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graph…

> It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense

I know successful agencies relying on OSS tools only (such as Gimp and Penpot) so I wouldn't mind that. I hope Gimp will have its Blender moment (I've been using Blender for years, but always kept coming back to Maya, this changed with the new UI)

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#104

Post by shufflerofrocks »

edu wrote: post #67
blowski wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service I really hope you’re exaggerating

From another comment, he teaches design. As a designer, I find it’s legit to downgrade a design student for using Canva.

That's important context then.

Using Canva for a design assignment is obviously a mis-step by the student, not a flaw of the tool itself

For short-term & quick usage, canva is a perfectly fine tool for editing/formatting stuff

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#105

Post by lstamour »

wdb wrote: post #98
lstamour wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually used the products you’re recommending and the Adobe equivalents? I would say that InDesign easily won over then industry-standard Quark nearly two decades ago, and Resolve is okay but not great at most things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Resolve and its pricing, but like Affinity, it’s not quite on par with the features of Adobe’s products. I’m routinely frustrated by missing features. I have c…

Resolve is so much better than Premiere. Resolve doesn’t crash half the time

Good point. And I should clarify, I’m not a filmmaker and mostly edit screen recordings and home movies. For that, I find that Resolve and Final Cut Pro work equally well and equally poorly. There’s a lot of room in video editing for further innovation, particularly if A.I. or automation can help simplify repetitive tasks. Premiere isn’t the best example of Adobe’s video tools - that title probably belongs to After Effects, an app inexplicably unique in its ease of editing and producing motion video graphics. No need to deal with translating your ideas into Nodes to get it working in Resolve. No need to try to fit within the limitations of titles and effects in FCP, etc. After Effects is Premiere’s killer app.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#106

Post by blowski »

edu wrote: post #67
blowski wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service I really hope you’re exaggerating

From another comment, he teaches design. As a designer, I find it’s legit to downgrade a design student for using Canva.

On what basis? Is Canva somehow cheating? I don't know, as I'm not a designer in any way.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#107

Post by user432678 »

graypegg wrote: post #16

Well, I’m glad I have my standalone license. I guess I’ll be on Designer V2 for the next 10 years like I was with Illustrator CS3.

I wonder if it will work that long without need for patches/updates with the current pace of deprecations in macOS. Using Affinity Photo myself, wondering if I’d better off switching to Windows at this point.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#109

Post by lstamour »

omnimus wrote: post #85
lstamour wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s see… they’re so far behind they only recently added pathfinder tools to their illustrator app with v2… initially claimed it wasn’t necessary https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/68819-bett... but then gave in and basically shipped it https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=... It’s hard to sell an entire industry on replacing tools that “just work” with a new set of tools unless…

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…

> 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.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#110

Post by GrumpySloth »

achow wrote: post #95
GrumpySloth wrote: post #87

This is very sad. I’ve been an Affinity customer since V1. What I expect to happen now is in some future a move to a subscription-based model and more focus on nonsense AI features and some useless cloud integration. Also: since when a company capable of routinely acquiring other established companies for tens of billions of dollars a startup?

> since when a company capable of routinely acquiring other established companies for tens of billions of dollars a startup The acquisition was for “several hundred million pounds”, nowhere near tens of billions of dollars.

My bad. I got some numbers in the article mixed up.
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