Link from the post:
Also someone linked this old tweet
Sigh… Why…? Why is it too hard? Why is it that in this day and age, we can’t simply have something we pay for and keep with no worries. Once I started owning software, Affinity was my choice. They had a long track record of not selling out, retaining high standards and a fairly priced transaction.
You pay for good software, the company works hard to make the software better, and then sells you a better version that you can upgrade at your own choice. Plain, simple and honest.
Nothing lasts in this day and age.
You used to be something Serif, but now you’re in the big leagues along with Adobe, and against them you’re nothing.
Undramatic PS: Affinity Designer is damn solid, like it more than big A’s Illustrator, shame I’m now afraid of pressing the update button >:(
I bought Designer last year as a one off. But there’s no point in mastering it anymore. That’s just going to suck you more into their ecosystem, then a subscription, then raising price, and then whatever they want.
Better give inkscape more practice.
lol at the “no plan to change at the moment” crap. that ship has already sailed.
I’ve used Designer for several years now in combination with inkscape very heavily for work having bashed my head against a wall called Adobe Illustrator for years - all the obvious reasons including terrible svg support. Inkscape should be supported for sure , but Designer has sped up workflow no end with what I use it for. It’s a shame that everything must enshittify.
The only thing that inkscape could be better at is image tracing. Other than that its my favorite vector software.
Better give inkscape more practice.
Too bad Inkscape uses GTK. It’s fine under Linux and okayish under Windows but under macOS it’s just horse shit. There’s a reason Krita’s popularity exploded. It just works great everywhere (heck, even Android under Samsung DeX).
What makes it bad on mac? On windows I find both krita and inkscape mediocre UI’s but idk how much of that is the toolkit, and how much just small open source teams not having time for ui/ux
Yeah, same with GIMP. I would love to use it on my Mac since I already use it and am comfortable with it on Linux, but it’s noticeably slow for some reason and you shouldn’t even try using it with the touchpad. The windows especially in multi-window mode don’t behave as you’d expect, the keybinds don’t either, it’s very meh all around. I was wondering whether I should get Affinity but I guess with this it’s a no.
The difference to GIMP is that Inkscape is written in C++, so a port to Qt would be more feasible than a Gimp port to Qt.
Krita on Mac works fine, btw. Get it on Steam if you want an auto updater.
was affinity actually on the same level as adobe ?
was affinity actually on the same level as adobe ?
Regarding what? There are no audio and video editors by Serif, for example.
I mean the ones they did have, e.g. was affinity photo as good as photoshop ?
was affinity photo as good as photoshop ?
It’s not as fully featured. Whether people care for such features is another question. It doesn’t support file format plugins (so no AVIF and HEIF support even through plugins) and it doesn’t have those AI features.
Welp - that’s the end of recommending affinity 😔
What a shit fuck
Yeah, very worried. Why would they purchase something unless they thought it would be profitable? I don’t want profitable software, I want fairly priced software.
I don’t want profitable software
What? You want all the software companies you depend on to go bankrupt?
I want fairly priced software
Canva is free for basic features and reasonably priced if you want features that cost them money such as 24/7 phone support, access to their stock artwork library, storing up to a terabyte of documents on their servers, etc.
I get the hesitation - we don’t know what they’re going to do with the affinity suite, but I wouldn’t immediately assume it will be ruined.
Given the context I don’t think they meant profitable as “The software makes a profit” but that the acquisition would be profitable given the costs to acquire it. The acquiring company likely has no attachment to the software itself and only sees a bunch of cows (customers) for milking.
I quite literally just bought this yesterday! Of course it happens now.
Well damn that sucks. I actually paid for affinity apps. I hike they don’t go the way of subscription, because I may as well don my sailing hat at that point.
for me gimp, inkscape and scribus are more than enough
For me, a graphic designer, gimp is quite possibly the worst software Ive ever used. I wins someone would fork Krita to have more image editing related features.
Inkscape, however, is fantastic.
sure, i wouldn’t even dream of doing any real graphics work daily on gimp. i just hope that the developement picks up speed and more contributors after gimp 3.0 releases hopefully in may.
Im more interested in Graphite personally https://graphite.rs/
Looks promising. Their website had me thinking I smashed my mobile glass. Nice troll
Graphite has interesting ideas but I’m no fan of the web first focus.
Plus every time I’ve tried, their raster editing has absolutely horrible performance.
that sounds interesting! thanks for sharing!
may I ask what’s wrong with gimp ? I’ve never used it for anything beyond basic editing
Namely the horrific UI. Everything is burried within menus and popup windows.
Remembering the situation when Macromedia was bought bei Adobe – now I have the same vibes again. Five years later nothing was left except Flash – that horrible piece of software – and Dreamweaver – I liked that one. The best transition back then was from Freehand to Illustrator and (consequently from Quark) to InDesign.
And then in 2015 to Affinity. So … 5 years with Corel, 12 years with Adobe/Macromedia, now 8 years with Affinity, so far … let’s see what they do and what we decide afterwards.
My first websites after hand coding were fine in Fireworks :'( I miss Macromedia stuff
Yeh. And Adobe were trying to compete with ImageReady. What a cluster that workflow was. Fireworks was great.
Do you want to lose customers forever? This is how you lose customers forever.
This is about the dumbest business decision either side could have made here. The Affinity tools’ only competitive advantage was not having the Adobe pricing model. Canva’s pricing model is basically dogshit Adobe lite.
“Family”
Nooooo, not Affinity! “Felt right” my ass, everyone has a price don’t they. Well at least I paid for it already, so even if they go subscription I’m fine. Unless they lock me out of it somehow. But then they will just die, as only reason people use it instead of adobe is the pricing
Sounds like a billion dollar deal
Yep. There’s no reason to continue development for V2 since they need to pivot to Canva integrations, and there’s no financial incentive to make anything new for V2 if they make V3 a part of Canva’s subscription
:(
I bought the V2 suite of their apps at release to support the company because I’m tired of perpetual subscription software. I’m not expecting lifetime updates or support, I just want whatever I paid for to work reasonably without hassles.
Out of the loop for this one. Is Affinity a software for graphics editing, which was regarded as an alternative to Adobe, but it now acquired by a big corp?
Pretty much
They had a set of programs that rivalled Adobe Photoshop and similar software, good enough to be used by the industry. They differentiated themselves by having everything available with a one-time purchase instead of Adobe’s monthly subscriptions.
They got acquired by a big corp that’s known for annoying subscriptions, so people are worried that the software won’t be developed in the same way anymore
Looked at Canva’s offerings for about 30 seconds and they all sound like trash.
I really liked Serif, it felt like they intended to do it right and largely did. I probably couldn’t walk away from a billion bucks, so I’ll try to to be too judgmental :-)
