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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

#311

Post by mandmandam »

Auracle wrote: post #300
mandmandam wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe Haha wow. I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon). You ought to play the Lotto. > Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator. "A lot" is drastically overstating the case. And in many ways Designer is leagues better. But it's all kinda moot - fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly.

I was a photographer until late last year and there were many weeks I spent 40 hours+ in Photoshop and I don’t remember a single crash. I’m on Windows, for what it’s worth.

Perhaps Adobe only crashes when it can smell fear... Like printers.

Really though, Photoshop and Illustrator both got buggy on me on a weekly/near daily basis. I used them all for decades. It feels like they were stable for a few years around like 1999-2001.

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

#313

Post by Daub »

upsuper wrote: post #141
Daub wrote: 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…

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 confess I have never used Canva myself. However, every pdf that students send our way from Canva is basically just series of flattened images. This also applies to the many Canva derived pdfs which I see from job applicants. So... What is going wrong? I will look into it and message you if I find anything new.

Thanks greatly for making contact. Only on Hacker News.

To be fair to your product, it is the only viable means by which a set of slides can be worked on collaborativly and online. You saw that InDesigns collaboration tools suck and stepped in.

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

#314

Post by pier25 »

omnimus wrote: post #310
pier25 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon).* Believe what you will. Their software used to crash a lot more for me 5-10 years ago but these days it's pretty solid in this regard. It used to feel super bloated too but since Apple Silicon it's been working great in terms of perf for me. > And in many ways Designer is leagues better. In what ways? Genuinely interested. I've been using vector graphic…

I suspect you are very experienced Illustrator and used to its ways and not that experienced Photoshop user. Because Photoshop people around in coments say that Photo is trash but Designer is good. I think its all inertia to learn new things. Adobe soft has so many wierd things that we got so used to that it gets hard to do it otherwise.

I've used both Illustrator and Photoshop for over 20 years.

Before that I was on the Corel suite using Draw and PhotoPaint since the mid 90s.

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

#315

Post by rcarmo »

WillAdams wrote: post #139
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…

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 used most of those (I paid my way through college with Photoshop 2.0 and Macromedia stuff). There is really nothing in the Open Source world that is good enough. Maybe Krita, but not for Illustrator-grade vector editing. I really miss Macromedia...

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

#316

Post by rcarmo »

mattanimation wrote: post #252
WillAdams wrote: post #139

Earlier 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…

Photopea as well (photoshop clone in browser)

That’s not a real alternative for a high-res workflow.

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

#317

Post by Daub »

goralph wrote: post #59
Daub wrote: 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

I see now that I should have made myself more clear. slides made in InDesign are indeed a stated requirment. Why....

I teach Design. One of the key learning outcomes of most design courses is the ability to handle long documents through their structural styles: heading 1, heading 2, caption, block quote, lists etc. Most design apps offer this functionality, even Powerpoint. However, none do it as elegantly as InDesign. I'm no Adobe fanboy (I do most of my own work in the Affinity suite) but InDesign remains the leader of the pack in this regard.

One crucial strength of InDesign is that it that manages anti aliasing of text very effectively. Just compare the output of ID to MS Word and you will see. I guess you are familiar with pdfs from LaTex? Compare those with pdfs from MS word. Similar difference.

It also does not produce or allow fake bold/italic etc. If a font does not have a built in bold then it won't fake one up by thickening the characters. This is why the font and charter panels in InDesign seem so feature-poor compared to those of Photoshop or Illusustor which offer such fake variants.

One final reason... cloud based services are risky things to rely on, especially in a uni. This year one service many students and staff used closed its doors. Caused a lot of angst.

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

#318

Post by seec »

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.

To be honest, that’s only one of the many reason to leave the Apple ecosystem in the near future.

I think that many would be better off switching to Windows (or Linux if they can) but they still believe or are attached to how things use to be.

I use to really love macOS but it has become an annoyance on many front, removing plenty of what made it better all while making it more and more like iOS and generally more closed and inflexible system.

Personally I have lost faith and I think that even if they would start reinvesting right now, it would take 10 years of pain with ever more expensive hardware.

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

#319

Post by seec »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #126
pentagrama wrote: post #123

I love Affinity Designer as a tool and his pay once license, I'm pretty sure that if you already purchased current version (V2), you will be fine, but I'm afraid they will go the subscription route soon like Adobe and Canva. Is suspicious that Affinity marketing was always highlighting the pay once license model and against subscription, and in the official announcement there is no mention of that. A lesson is that w…

It will probably go subscription, unfortunately. But the smart move would be to double the price (obviously not immediately, but eventually) while retaining the pay once model and really doubling down on the professional aspect of the Affinity products (even if, compared to Adobe, they're not super professional grade yet ). The reason people bought Affinity stuff was the pay once deal. That's how you retain those cus…

I agree but if they want to double the price they really need to be a lot better. Last time I used it for a quick project (relatively simple yet complex restaurant menu layout) I really wished I had used Adobe stuff instead (paid for a month or bootleg version). On the surface Affinity stuff is nice but it is very lacking in some not even advanced use cases and rather finicky, errors/bugs prone. You end up spending a lot more time, building up a lot more frustration than you would with Adobe tools.

Adobe is stupid expensive for someone who do not make money off it, but their software are quite good all things considered…

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