davidmalcolm

As far as quality issues, I find the Affinity apps LESS buggy than Adobe's. Heck I figured when I got my new 2018 MacBook Pro that I'd trial the current version of Photoshop CC, because I hadn't had a computer powerful enough to run a bloated current gen version of Photoshop in a while. And it CHUGGED! My Wacom intuos 4 was clunky and jittery, and it felt worse than I remembered CS2 feeling on my old Core Duo MacBook. I messed with the settings a bit until I finally gave up. (I haven't needed to do any real graphic work lately though I do have a good bit of experience.

I won't claim that the Affinity Apps are always perfect. Last time I was drawing a lot on my iPad Pro I found Procreate had better default settings for the Apple Pencil than either of the Affinity apps. (Though it's been a while, I should try again.) But for what I use them for, Affinity's apps are bloody powerful and in many cases superior to Adobe's. Especially from a design perspective. When I'm designing logos or characters, I often don't know exactly what I want it to look like and experiment with a lot of ideas. What I found when I switched over to Designer was that my work got SO much better than in Illustrator. Now to be honest I will say at the time the brush tool in Illustrator felt better than the one in Designer in terms of smoothness (I think they've now added enough tweakable options for you to be able to refine to pressure curve on the pen and smooth things out if the defaults don't work well for you). But Designer's UI really encourages you to play/experiment. You can try something, decide you don't like it and do something else way quicker than you can in illustrator.

Also since the code base is SOOOO much newer, there's a lot of things that I remember thinking, "I wish I knew exactly what this filter will look like," whereas because Affinity does everything with live (now Metal accelerated) previews, you don't have to guess and then undo if it doesn't look right.

If you're coming in with having used Adobe's products a ton, yeah there's going to be things you're not used to, and there's going to be things you're used to using that aren't there. But if you could take two grade 10 versions of me (the age I was when I was introduced to Photoshop) and you give one Photoshop and Illustrator, and you give the other Photo and Designer. I can PROMISE YOU, that the version of me that you give the Affinity Apps is going to blow the other version of me out of the water in a couple years after they've had time to get used to them.

Serif and their investors are playing a VERY smart game against Adobe. They may 'only' have two million users worldwide, but a lot of those users are going to be kids who can actually legally afford their products. When those kids go to university or college to learn graphic design, they might HAVE to learn Adobe, but they'll already KNOW Affinity. They'll hand in work that they do in their Affinity apps, and their professor won't even understand how they did it in Photoshop, because all they can see is a PSD file. But when that student gets a job, they're going to only use Adobe products if their work is paying for them, if they do their own freelancing, they'll just use the less expensive full featured apps they own. Heck sometimes at work they'll cheat and use Affinity then export to PSD or PDF and nobody will be the wiser.

600 bucks a year isn't a lot to pay if you're making thousands upon thousands with Adobe's products every year. But for more casual freelancers, or for employees who handle graphic art duties for a church, or non-profit, Affinity's suite is an awesome choice. Those customers will keep them in business, and as they keep going Affinity will eventually have every important feature that Creative Cloud has for most users.

Ideally Adobe stays in business, but I suspect they'll eventually start making much less money.

I can't remember if AstroPad cost money or if the app was always free, either way I remember I got it as soon as I could, but was never really able to use it because the performance wasn't great. I hear that they got the performance quite good, especially with the Luna dongle, but they did that around the time Affinity Designer and Photo came to the iPad and around the time the Procreate became a better tool to draw in than Photoshop. Realistically sidecar isn't quite as useful as it would have been when the iPad Pro first launched with Pencil. (Though part of that was probably due to Apple's planning. They wanted the drawing apps on iPad to grow and mature and didn't want 'Photoshop on a connected computer' to undercut them. Part of me thinks that Sidecar was put on hold until Adobe finally invested in a native version of Photoshop.

Realistically I think the time when I would have used Sidecar a whole bunch has passed now that there are some fantastic drawing apps on iPad. Frankly I think the major thing that I might REALLY use Sidecar for would be working in Affinity Designer or Photo on my Mac and wanting to draw something quickly, I might turn on Sidecar and grab my Apple Pencil, drag the window down to the iPad, fill the screen, draw for a little bit, then pull it back up onto my Thunderbolt Monitor to get back to working with a mouse. Part of of me would absolutely love if Serif made a feature where you can have two windows showing the same content but on two different monitors (IE iPad and your Mac's built in or an bigger external) but without actually having to mirror since the aspect ratio etc won't be the same.)

As far as AstroPad goes, it seems like the guys involved are absolutely amazing at compressing video over a finite connection, they can probably take some of the techniques they developed and sell them to Apple or somebody else. They could also take what they know of working with Apple and develop a kickass drawing App. Given that Apple has Affinity and Pixelmator (as well as Sketch, Acorn and Procreate) making drawing apps for their platforms, they don't seem to be interested in doing a drawing or graphics app. Plus Adobe is ignoring the non-industry market, so there is a really competitive field there that they could play in.

I feel sorry for them because they were working on a really great feature. But that's also part of the problem, like what Jobs told the Dropbox guys, "You have a feature, not a product." (Though in Dropbox's case Apple and everyone else managed to fumble cloud storage enough that Dropbox turned that feature into a business that I still don't understand how it's survived and thrived.)

As far as PCalc goes, I think that guy realizes that his market is really people who are willing to pay for a calculator. And that market will always be uniquely small and goofy.  There is only a small number of people who are ever willing to pay for a calculator on a computer.

I hope AstroPad are able to take some of their code they've written and find a new purpose for it. I also hope that Apple opens up their APIs that make sidecar work so that AstroPad can make a premium version of Sidecar. Though if I were them I wouldn't want to be Apple's beta testers for feature ideas. I'd take pride in knowing that I got sherlocked because I had a great implementation of something that Apple's engineers might not have even known how to design. I'd hold my head high and figure out something else that would be more of a full product than a single feature. (Also I wouldn't try pricing my feature as an expensive subscription. The price for AstroPad Pro really made it something that I was never going to consider as I don't make my living in selling my services as a graphic artist.)