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Affinity Studio now free
321–330 of 825 posts
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Raw formats arent going away but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles. Also the DNG spec does continue to be iterated on, not that users will be forced into the latest features like jpeg-xl compression, but some of the changes can be very breaking to older apps.
I haven't checked, do they use Apple's RAW library on macOS? If so, at least support might evolve with macOS updates for the time being.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#323It seems that the Affinity apps are removed from the Mac App Store? That would be a shame, because they are sandboxed. I don't want yet another app with unfettered access. Of course, I can still download them from my purchases, but I think there will be no updates anymore?
Yeah, I used to use the app store version of Slack because it was sandboxed. (I later switched to having Safari run it as a web application.) Even if I trusted them, the sandbox would be a layer of protection against bugs. I'd love to have an an easy way to wrap that sandbox around non-app-store applications.
Developers can still choose to enable sandbox for apps delivered outside of App Store. Some of them simply choose to not do so: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/hardened-...
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#324Freeium mostly sucks. Escape before they squeeze every drop of blood out of you. There is a cost to everything that is how the reality get's in.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
For personal use, piracy is always an option.
How does that work with SaaS?
You have to board a container ship hauling containers full of modern smartphones, capable of passing remote attestation so you can work with passkeys and app push notification based auth and whatever other bullshit "security" measures get popular in the next decade.
Then you have to find out when some C-suite from the SaaS of interest goes on a cruise, board that ship, and extort lifetime accounts hard-wired to charge some cost center inside of the SaaS. Then you can sell those accounts along with the phones as something resembling "pay once use forever" box software.
Nobody said sailing the high seas in the 21st century is easy.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Raw formats arent going away but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles. Also the DNG spec does continue to be iterated on, not that users will be forced into the latest features like jpeg-xl compression, but some of the changes can be very breaking to older apps.
Especially with v2's lack of real plugin or scripting options, and with no cross-version interchange format like IDML or apparently even partial backward-compatiblity support in v3, it's also less possible to drag v2 even slightly forward than it was with Adobe CS4/5.
If you're a freelancer using v2 and someone gives you v3 files, you can't work.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#327I used Affinity for several years, so to add some background here: Serif is the company that originally built this software. -------- 2014–2024 Serif developed the Affinity suite, a collection of three independent desktop apps sold with a one-time payment model: - Affinity Designer: vector graphic design (Adobe Illustrator equivalent) - Affinity Photo: digital image editing (Adobe Photoshop equivalent) - Affinity Pub…
Thank you for the context. I was an Affinity Suite user for a long time after I dropped Adobe.
I now use a mixture of GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape for visual things. I don't have a good alternative for InDesign - even Affinity Publisher wasn't one. Since my tabletop RPG business closed, I haven't had a need for a powerful layout application. I just use Typst or LaTeX for my personal projects that need a layout engine.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#328Isn't everyone using Rive these days?
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you freeze your machine in its current state, software that isn't maintained will eventually stop working.
This is only true for very badly written software, and/or on platforms that maintain very bad backward compatibility. It's not some natural law of software--it's choices that (IMO) bad developers choose to make over and over.
Unfortunately there's also security people who work day and night to break old software and hardware that cannot keep up with the latest security standards.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#330Thoughts on opensource alternatives? - Inkscape is an obvious one --- there's also https://cenon.info/ , perhaps Gravit Designer? Any word on Graphite.rs 's stand-alone desktop version? - GIMP, Paint.net, Darktable and Krita - Scribus or LaTeX or Typst
Haven't seen anything on Graphite.rs (site is still suggesting Q4 2025) but people on the Affinity Discord have been putting a lot of disgruntled new eyes on it.