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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

#131
post #89

This caused me to bite the bullet and buy the v2 universal licence, currently 30% off. If you've ever bought anything v1 including a single app you probably qualify for the upgrade offer which is an extra 25% off on top of the sale https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/store/upgrade-offer/ I'm not necessarily against their inevitable subscription model, but may as well get the standalone while the getting is good. There a…

The problem with V2 license is that it cannot be activated offline so Canva can take a courageous decision to stop activations any time in future. V1 is great because it can be activated offline.

Interesting! I didn't realise this, however on balance I think I'm still happy with my purchase. Also looking into it, business licences (minimum of 2 pack purchase) can still be activated offline, just in case that is useful to anyone https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/188396-off...

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

#133

Why every product I like ends up being bought... argh, we can't have nice things.

It's interesting, if a car company is bought then they keep churning out cars (usually), if a software company is bought it's often broken. Software dev is a fragile thing relying on a network of talented individuals which is very easily broken by accountants and bottom lines. In some ways it's more like movie companies with networks of creatives that can be damaged by a takeover - Disney/Marvel immediately comes to mind.

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

#134
post #59
post #31

This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else. As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select a…

You don’t sound like a good educator. Perhaps withhold your personal and subjective gripes for the sake of your students

Telling their students to avoid locking down their works inside a subscription-based service is good imo.

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

#135

The link should probably be changed to official announcement.[1] That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existin…

of course. big corporations only think about profit. affinity as we know it are dead.

Unlike small corporations who only think about selling themselves out to the big ones

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

#137

Based on last published accounts (2022) Serif is very profitable and growing strongly: revenue £31.2m (up from £23.4m) and operating profits £17.9m (up from £14.4m). So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell. Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.

Mel and Cliff are not even 40. See the Australian young rich list, they are the first one and two: https://www.afr.com/young-rich/the-10-richest-young-australi...

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

#138

Based on last published accounts (2022) Serif is very profitable and growing strongly: revenue £31.2m (up from £23.4m) and operating profits £17.9m (up from £14.4m). So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell. Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.

Mel and Cliff are not even 40. See the Australian young rich list, they are the first one and two: https://www.afr.com/young-rich/the-10-richest-young-australi...

Serif’s owners not Canva’s.

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

#139
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…

In addition to Gimp there are:

- Paint.net

- Pixen

- Inkscape --- straight-forward vector editing

- Seashore --- this is Mac OS UI overlay for GIMP

- Krita --- vector editing with painting features

- Scribus --- page layout

- TeX/LaTeX --- batch/markup driven page layout which can do anything one can put together a TeX macro to achieve (I use it a lot and have written articles for TUGboat on it: https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf

- Blender -- 3D modeling

- GraviT --- another vector editor, this is likely the one most like to Affinity Designer (since they were both modeled on Freehand)

- FontForge

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

#140
post #72

There was something so special and powerful about Affinity Designer V1. It was just a supreme amount of value and such a robust application that it became the tool I learned to do graphic design on, and the tool I loved. I feel like something slipped with Designer V2 - the features went a bit weird and broad, and the amount of bugs got irritating and eroded my love for it and it being my go-to recommendation. That al…

The sad thing is that much of what was really nice in AD came from copying Aldus/Altsys/Macromedia Freehand.

I wish Adobe had at least put all of Freehand's capabilities into InDesign --- I might still be using it if that were the case.

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