Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative • Hacker News Board

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#71

Post by cageface » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 12:07 PM UTC

MattP_Affinity wrote: post #54

cageface wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that the reason that apps like this and Sketch are Mac-only is that the OS X provides APIs like Quartz and CoreGraphics that do a lot of the heavy lifting for drawing apps. So there's a lot less code to write for an app like this.

Affinity supports RGB8/16, CMYK and Lab colour spaces - but Quartz/CoreGraphics does not. We needed to make sure we produced a pro level application - which necessitates pro colour support so there's no way to do this if you're limited to what the OS provides: That's why we have our own renderer which took a lot of development to make so powerful and fast.

Interesting. I'm sure writing a custom renderer for an app like this would be a very large chunk of work.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#72

Post by armandososa » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 12:22 PM UTC

TheZenPsycho wrote: post #35

Tloewald wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sketch is a bit nasty for freehand drawing. I'm very much not a Corel Draw fan, but loved Freehand when it was still around. Illustrator still lags Freehand of ten years ago in a lot of respects. Affinity looks very promising.

Interesting. What did freehand have that illustrator does not?

I'm not the guy you're replying to, but from my experience I think it is less a matter of features and more about different ways of doing the same thing. Basic stuff as how selection works (will the selection marquee select only the encompassing objects, every object it touches or a fragment of the object?) is very important when you are spending hours a day with a tool.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#73

Post by AnthonBerg » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 12:34 PM UTC

TheZenPsycho wrote: post #35

Tloewald wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sketch is a bit nasty for freehand drawing. I'm very much not a Corel Draw fan, but loved Freehand when it was still around. Illustrator still lags Freehand of ten years ago in a lot of respects. Affinity looks very promising.

Interesting. What did freehand have that illustrator does not?

The bezigon tool for one, a more sensible and thought-out feel and flow, lots of small features that Just Worked. It's been a while so I can't comment further, but Freehand was a far better tool for me. Illustrator is more of a hodgepodge / mishmash / design-by-committee thing somehow.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#74

Post by hamvocke » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 1:13 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #69

Is this good for making game graphics? I tried Sketch but it was not suited for the task at all.

Sure, why shouldn't you be able to create game graphics? As long as you can export rasterized images I see no limitations on what you could or could not create with a vector illustration software.

Could you elaborate why Sketch didn't work out for you?

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#75

Post by boudewijnrempt » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 1:33 PM UTC

michaelbuddy wrote: post #49

jwatte wrote: post #41

Illustrator needs disruption, true. But Photoshop needs disrupt even more! (And don't get me started on only two computers for the full subscription install!)

Yes sir. I thought Krita was going to be a good new alternative for Photoshop, being open source but sadly it's got basic things missing. You can't even nudge a layer using arrow keys you have to drag layer content with the mouse. Laggy too. GIMP is well, always GIMP. Paintshop Pro, Corel Draw, Painter those don't really hit the mark. UI is always just odd. I feel lost honestly. I'm glad I have cs6 master collection…

Of course you can move a layer with the keyboard. You just need to configure that, because that's not the default. And it's not the default because our users tell us they prefer to pan with the arrow keys by default.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#76

Post by jpgvm » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 2:09 PM UTC

tumultco wrote: post #26

sbarre wrote: post #3

I wonder how this compares to Sketch? There seem to be a bunch of Mac-only vector apps coming out in recent years.. Not just these direct Illustrator competitors, but HTML5 animation tools too like Hype, Paintcode, etc.. that provide vector drawing and animation tools, and are coming from small teams and cost very little (relatively speaking)... Is this because there are more powerful native components in OS X that m…

One of the founders of Tumult Hype here -- When we started out Adobe was still sticking to their Flash guns. As HTML5 was the only method to make animated web content on iOS, it was clear someone needed to make tools aimed at graphic designers, so we decided that someone should be us! Luckily with no other competing apps around, we didn't have to deal with an uphill battle on feature parity unlike these vector editor…

Hype is awesome.

I do wonder though, how many people do you get asking for you to support Windows? I know alot of Adobe shops that adopted Windows in previous years so I am just curious what the numbers are like.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#77

Post by jpgvm » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 2:18 PM UTC

MattP_Affinity wrote: post #61

radley wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just say EPS on your home page instead of AI or PDF?

AI and PDF compatibility will both be present in the product we launch with - which is what the website is trying to describe to interested potential users. The beta will also get these features very soon, so I don't see the problem? We can't expect users to keep checking back on the website to see if we've added any new features that we always knew were going to be in the finished product but hadn't listed, just bec…

To be fair this is HackerNews.

It's a sales site, deep down we understand why you did what you did and why you say what you say. We have all done it in the past. But there is always that dick that wants to pick a bone.

Don't worry about it. Though I would probably try be abit more upfront about the beta and the limitations of the beta at the download phase. After you have collected email addresses etc just let the user know this is indeed beta software and it's missing x, y and z.

Considering your early adopters are going to be more adventurous.. then it might make sense to post detailed release notes. This serves a double purpose. It means you are upfront with your current users (likely to be your first paid customers) and it sets the tone for open communication.

Said tone is awfully important. It's the difference between "I'll report this bug and it will probably be fixed 2 weeks from now" and "F$#k it, these guys don't give a sh*t". Not to say the latter will necessarily happen but only that tone counts for alot when you are selling a tool that peoples livelihood may very well depend upon.

Best of luck anyways. I love working with graphics on the Mac and think your product is a welcome addition.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#78

Post by wldcordeiro » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

I actually like Illustrator a lot and can't see this or even Inkscape as actual alternatives to it.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#79

Post by Tloewald » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 2:46 PM UTC

TheZenPsycho wrote: post #35

Tloewald wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sketch is a bit nasty for freehand drawing. I'm very much not a Corel Draw fan, but loved Freehand when it was still around. Illustrator still lags Freehand of ten years ago in a lot of respects. Affinity looks very promising.

Interesting. What did freehand have that illustrator does not?

It could fit text to a region, transforms didn't require specific tools, it handled opacity properly, its bezier-editing tools were more refined, and a bunch of other things I'm probably forgetting.

Illustrator today has far more functionality (largely borrowed from Photoshop) than Freehand did, but Freehand had better core functionality than Illustrator (and it also introduced many of the features now in Illustrator, e.g. booleans).

Actually, if you're curious, just google freehand vs. illustrator -- it's pretty depressing how they compare despite freehand being 10 years old.

e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f8CKjsYS9k

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#80

Post by egypturnash » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 2:48 PM UTC

gulpahum wrote: post #25

egypturnash wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of it is that Adobe's UIs have gotten so relentlessly fucked-up. They have their own cross-platform UI toolkit that always feels just a little wrong. And they keep on making things worse; the latest release of AI, for instance, has a truly horrible new font dropdown menu due to their desire to integrate a 'buy fonts on Typekit' button into what once worked quickly and elegantly.

I know that Mac users are very sensitive towards all cross-platform and non-native UI toolkits. I have always wondered why I haven't seen many complaints about the Adobe non-native UI on Mac. So, its interesting to hear that it does feel a bit wrong.

It's been like six years, we're all just kinda resigned to it. It's not a healthy relationship.