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Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
221–230 of 353 posts
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#222This is deeply saddening news. I own Affinity Photo and Designer and I'm sure in a few years people won't be able to say that. For most of my usage, mind you, Krita and Inkscape have been able to meet my needs, so more than likely this will just solidify my preference for the open source options out there.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/TUGbo…
I wish more people knew-of/promoted Krita - it's far more user friendly than GIMP and just as powerful if not more. Fantastic for photo editing, digital art/paint and vector tools. https://krita.org/en/features/
Krita is a close second to Blender in terms of well-run creative FOSS projects. Would love to see more projects take their approach.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#224Based 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.
What's the net profit?
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're a great educator! I'm surprised that other people here cannot separate their subjective opinions, whether they agree with your judgment, from fact, whether you're a good educator. It would be more reasonable to say: A good educator would help students understand that PDF files should have a small file size, and if a student fails to notice that, you will have to downgrade them for lack of attention to importan…
If the course makes it clear that grading is affected by accessibility and efficiency of file size, and then submitted work ignores those factors - regardless of Canva being used - then downgrading it is justified. Perhaps it’s obvious to designers that Canva has these problems, but to a non-designer like myself, the comment sounds like snobbery, with students’ grades affected by the capricious whims of their teacher…
> Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
How is that off topic when there are literally people in this thread from Canva arguing the framing and not the main point he made? Everything you disagree with isn't off topic.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#226This 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.
Great to know, I pondered buying V2 as a V1 owner, but now they can kiss my butt.
The only downside is that Affinity V2 has no option to save files in a V1-compatible manner. Which stinks for exchanging stuff with other Affinity users.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#227... and let the enshittification begin!
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Creative Cloud launcher digs its greedy fingers deep in your system, running hundreds of processes and constantly phoning home. It’s the model I point to when people say they want alternate app stores. I would much rather download apps individually from the App Store, or at worst a dmg.
It would be fantastic for an OS to mandate a particular type of installation (oh how I miss dragging app packages from a .dmg into my Application directory & being done with it) while preventing anything else.
A lot of desktop software devs are averse to anything but old style full access to everything all the time, but yes I agree. Most software has no good reason to put files anywhere outside of its own application bundle and ~/Library/Application Support//.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, everyone of their clients was paying for a license. Affinity was not free/fremium.
Affinity has a $100 one-time payment, and you can use it in perpetuity. Adobe's customers are paying $60+ per month. So there was a lot of unrealized market value. No shit they wanted to cash out on it.
we all were happily paying for upgrades.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#230Based 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.
>So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell.
They probably didn’t need to sell (but who knows) but an offer of a buyout at a 20x multiple (based on the Bloomberg report) when the core business faces competition from Adobe and Canva, not just for core features where depending on context, Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete (and AI is a big part of Canva and Adobe’s plans, whether certain vocal users like it or not), is compelling.
As a longtime user, this move makes me sad because I know I’ll lose some good tools to an inevitable subscription push (I also have Adobe CC and Canva subscriptions that I use for very different tasks so I’m not completely opposed to paying for a sub, but I certainly won’t pay Adobe prices for Affinity), but I can’t fault the company from wanting to exit, especially when the climate is what it is for the tools they sell.
Let’s put it this way, I can’t imagine them doing better than this.