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Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

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231–240 of 353 posts

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

#231
post #39
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…

Why would you downgrade a student based on the tool they use to create their presentations instead of the content itself?

same reason you'd downgrade a programming student if they handed in an assignment as an Excel macro? Not just because of the VBA but because to use it you now need to buy MS Office?

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

#232
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they made a bad tool choice for their own convenience ? That leads here to big images and unselectable text, no accessibility.

In Canva we do care about accessibility. While I admit our editor may still have a long way to go on providing an accessible editing experience, unselectable text in export result is more likely an overlooked bug than anything intentional.

And if you're coming from the Affinity side, don't worry your new corporate overlords DO care about people, and employees are their #1 priority

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

#233

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 appreciate that, but it doesn’t deal with the reality that subscriptions are several times more expensive than buying up-front.

I can buy Affinity Designer for $50 and use it for 5 years. That’s less than a dollar a month. If they move to a subscription, I bet it’s going to be more than a dollar a month.

If it was really just about regular reoccurring revenue, we would see more $1 monthly subscriptions and fewer $5/month subscriptions.

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

#234
post #33
post #28

Hopefully this will allow the Serif team to improve their products. I bought their products from day one with the hope they would get better but after 10 years or so I'm still on Adobe.

What could they do better? I am interested.

There's plenty but as an example the group isolation feature in Designer. To me is the biggest deal breaker.

It has been requested plenty of times and there are multiple threads in their forum. This one is 10 years old:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-is...

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

#235
post #20

Earlier 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.

I agree about Creative Cloud. I too hate it with a passion. But when I said "Adobe is better" I was referring to the apps themselves.

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

#236
post #59
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

Almost agree, but submitting research information as an image, and not selectable/copyable text is kind of unacceptable these days.

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

#237
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to subscriptions.

And bloatware. Affinity runs smoother on Mac.

This used to be the case but in my experience Adobe runs better in Apple Silicon than Affinity does.

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

#238
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…

There is also Graphite (https://graphite.rs/) which, unlike Gimp, has a modern architecture and very ambitious goals (Blender for 2D basically).

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

#239
post #202

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…

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/

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

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

#240
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t sound like a good educator. Perhaps withhold your personal and subjective gripes for the sake of your students

Telling their students to avoid locking down their works inside a subscription-based service is good imo.

It's good advice sure. But downgrading their work, no. Unless you have explicit requirements that aren't met like your text being selectable, downgrading work because you have a prejudice against an authoring tool isn't cool. What if another educator has an issue with Power Point, and another with Sheets. Should students have to match their authoring tool with their educators for each lesson?

Students are there to learn, no to cater to your preferences.

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