OK, there goes a decent-ish Adobe alternative. Now it will be more subscriptions, polluted with embedded Canva shit, and perhaps phasing out the desktop apps altogether.
Adobe is for pros.
Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
321–330 of 353 posts
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
There are small or comparatively small corporations who proudly and decidedly stay small, and even refuse to sell.
https://cdm.link/2021/11/ableton-reportedly-refused-investme...
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
of course. big corporations only think about profit. affinity as we know it are dead.
Is there a company that doesn't think about profit?
Primarily? Yes. But there are even companies that rather lose money than compromise on some product or other principles. Mind you, those are privately owned. Boards and shareholders fuck everything they touch.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#324OK, there goes a decent-ish Adobe alternative. Now it will be more subscriptions, polluted with embedded Canva shit, and perhaps phasing out the desktop apps altogether.
Adobe is for pros.
"Pros" is not well defined, unless if it's just used to mean "people getting paid for work they do by using the software" (what actually separates the pros from the non-pros: getting paid).
Otherwise, it's a "no true Scotsman" thing, only including the 10% of hardcore graphic designers deep into Photoshop and Illustrator and such, and not the 90% of web designers, app UI designers, content creators, artists, and others, who might or might not use Adobe, but that still often make more $ than belleguered "pro" graphic designers.
It's like how an exexutive using an MBP and making $500,000k/year is "not a pro" for some, but some guy using it to make $70k/year is, and somehow gets to define what is or isn't a "pro machine".
For what many (or most) people do in 2024, many alternatives, including Affinity, Canva, Figma, Sketch, and others, are fine for their professional (as in, charging customers, or earning money by work created using the software) use cases.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#325Official statement from Affinity (Serif): https://affinity.serif.com/de/press/newsroom/canva-statement... Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold? There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase. Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were…
>Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were originally purchased
Until of course Apple changes some API, or Windows users want to jump to ARM or something, and then they're up shit creek.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#326Official statement from Affinity (Serif): https://affinity.serif.com/de/press/newsroom/canva-statement... Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold? There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase. Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were…
> at this time Anything a business says about current business should have 'at this time' appended. They are simply being honest.
This is a different context. Whenever an acquired business says "at this time", it means "forget everything you think you knew about us, so long suckers!".
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only reason people get Affinity is because of the non subscription model. Adobe software is just better.
I paid $lot for the entire Affinity suite and DxO Photolab instead of going with the (quite good) Adobe offerings just to avoid the insanity that is the Adobe Creative Cloud launcher. I deeply hate apps that install, auto-run and auto-update other apps. Affinity and DxO give you a DMG.
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Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#328Earlier 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 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…
I realized that we provide an option called "Flatten PDF" [1] which does exactly what you described: flatten everything including text into a big image per page. It makes all text unselectable and also produces a very large file.
This feature was introduced for printing consistency as PDF viewers and print drivers may render things differently. But I don't think it's selected by default, so users have to consciously tick it to make it happen.
But it seems that our support team sometimes presents this feature as a way to solve user issues, so maybe that's the reason.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love HN.
There should be no need for HN to provide this kind of support channel. It exhibits how things don’t work.
You are assuming the parent poster actually attempted to go through support and work through the issue. I don't see indication of that. If anything, this thread indicates to me that many people form an opinion of a product and never seek support or never seek to revisit the issue and see if it has been fixed.
Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 par…
I was a professional photographer until late last year. Photoshop’s new AI tools are an absolutely incredible timesaver. Jobs that would have taken 30+ minutes (and probably wouldn’t look great) can now take 30 seconds. It was kind of amazing watching the perception shift online in photography groups from “AI is evil!” to “Wow, this is really helpful.” There’s no way they could keep competing, even if they tried to t…
Absolutely agreed. And your observation is the same I’ve seen with many of my artist friends. Everyone went from “fuck this Firefly shit” to “I need all of this yesterday.”
Canva already uses AI in really smart ways and if they can extend that approach into Affinity and have the two products compliment each other, that could def be a value-add for Canva users. But the more I think about it, the more I think this was the only thing Serif could do and although I sympathize with angry Affinity users as one myself, I think we have to acknowledge that Affinity’s chances of survival as a perpetually licensed product were basically over, acquisition or no acquisition, at least if you look out long-term.