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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

#271

Post by graypegg »

nrml_amnt wrote: post #242
upsuper wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, I'm an engineer in Canva's editing team, which is also responsible for rendering of designs. Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so. I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer…

I love HN.

"I wish the Xs at Y would make Y do Z"

> "Hi, I'm a X from Y. Y already does Z. I did that last Tuesday."

Always my favourite genre of interactions on this site.

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

#272

Post by hbn »

zubspace wrote: post #45
sotsoguk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad, but true

Yes, and let me explain why. Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income. While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maxi…

I feel like they could have a sustainable model if they had a more expensive one-time purchase and every few years released a new major version that required a one-time purchase again. If you bought the old version you can continue to use it, but it's no longer officially supported nor will it receive any future updates.

I wish there was an option for this with e.g. Photoshop. I want to have PS because it's occasionally handy or fun for photoshopping my friends as a joke, but I don't need it for anything that makes me money so I can't justify paying. But if I had a slightly outdated version I could purchase once, I'd be find not getting all the latest updates.

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

#273

Post by layer8 »

nrml_amnt wrote: post #242
upsuper wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, I'm an engineer in Canva's editing team, which is also responsible for rendering of designs. Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so. I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer…

I love HN.

There should be no need for HN to provide this kind of support channel. It exhibits how things don’t work.

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

#274

Post by themagician »

user432678 wrote: post #107
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.

We really need a version of Docker for desktop apps on macOS now. Would be nice to not have to worry about what's going to be broken after an update.

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

#275

Post by skydhash »

zubspace wrote: post #45
sotsoguk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad, but true

Yes, and let me explain why. Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income. While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maxi…

I have a few subscriptions and most are annually paid. I consider that as a one time payment with updates free for the year. But what I don’t like is when the price don’t match the value, my data taken hostage, and updates that break my workflow (and “AI” features activated without my knowing). I got rid of anything like this in my personal computing space.

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

#276

Post by abhpro »

presentation wrote: post #29
KingOfCoders wrote: post #17

(Customer from the very beginning for Designer&Photo, made a book with Publisher) They will move to subscriptions (there will be many more of these moves, see VMWare), which will kill their differenitation towards Adobe and kill the product. If subscription, I can use Illustrator (which has 10x more tutorials than Designer). Most companies screw up M&A.

If the pricing model is the only thing that differentiates Affinity then that wouldn’t have been a very good sign for their future

It's clearly enough for many people. That's the only reason I use Affinity, although I do agree Adobe could change their pricing models overnight and they would be in trouble.

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

#277

Post by anonymousab »

graypegg wrote: post #265

From the forum, on the topic of the buyout: "[I] Realise there seems to be a distinct lack of faith flying around here, but we'll be revealing more about our plans in the coming days and yes I'm sure you will all be pleased with what we have to say." - Ash So that's at least possibly a sign of better information to follow. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201413-aff...

Well, we'll see what they have to say.

But I wouldn't get my hopes up. "There are no changes to our current pricing model planned _at this time_" is already a very telling part of Serif's previous statement.

While they have earned a measure of trust, the problem is that they aren't the ones you need to trust anymore - if Canva wants to turn Affinity into a collection of bloodsucking subscription apps, then that's what's going to happen, short of a legally binding guarantee to the contrary.

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

#278

Post by themagician »

dudus wrote: post #30

Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers. Don't be fooled by the cheeky templates and filters,they are going heavy on AI, with some interesting features such as inpainting and video background removal. I guess that's either a very lucrative business or they have a ton of VC money behi…

Canva powers the scam market. It's played a big part helping the scam market expand. Everything from "make money online" creative to flooding Etsy with poorly designed AI garbage to crypto scams. Canva and Stan are the peanut butter and jelly of scammery in 2024.

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

#279

Post by basisword »

ZiiS wrote: post #249
basisword wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought they were different tools. GIMP == Photoshop, Krita == Illustrator.

Krita defaults to a "Paint Layer" behaving very like Photoshop; it can also add "Vector Layers" that behave like Illustrator. I think it is fair to say it replaces both for a lot of use cases. GIMP is much closer to just Photoshop (and say Inkscape is much more only Illustrator).

Interesting! I'll have to check it out.

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

#280

Post by matwood »

LordAtlas wrote: post #270
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…

Affinity already disappointed the original believers when they started off telling people they could pay a one-time fee and get all future updates for free. They then ditched version 1.xx buyers by releasing a version 2 that you could only use if you paid them again.

Affinity should not have said that (if they did), and no one should have believed them. That's just not how software or business works. Even if we go back in time to packaged software, big updates were always a pay for upgrade.
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