Preview: Affinity Publisher (beta)

I received my copy of the Affinity Publisher beta today and had to time look at all the tutorials that came with it and go over many of it's functions to see where this might all be going.

To be 100% clear: this is a the first beta of a new software, it's not even close to ready for production use.

Overall, the interface and functions are the same or similar to the other Affinity apps, bravo on a job well done with a consistent interface throughout. In this first beta, most of the the most basic functions are there and not much more. I tried to set up a typical document from my steady design client and it fell short on a few things that would be deal breakers if this was a finished product. O the other hand, the potential is truly there and is easy to see. While they are not activated, this will have design and photo personas, meaning native Affinity Designer and Photo files imported into a layout can be edited within Publisher itself. A big time saver.

Text manipulation and functionality is already good enough for real life usage, at least in most of my work. I did come across a big problem for me, the find and replace is something I use to reformat numbers across a project of document from one font to another, since I have clients who use one font for text and a another for numbers. As of this version I could not find a way to do that that worked.

I really like the table features over Indesign's tables, they are just easier to access and use much in the same way Designer makes accessing nodes a no brainer while Illustrator is always slightly torturous. There is an image box feature I never would have thought of, basically the box will resize the image automatically to best fit the size of the box. its neat and in many cases I imagine it will save  time and make the workflow more intuitive.

So far so good. A HUGE problem Affinity will have with Publisher is that many people like Indesign quite a bit as it's one of Adobe's best apps and rightfully took over the industry shortly after it's release. It will be an uphill battle to get this as fully featured and accepted by printers. One way would be to integrate really amazing digital publishing into it, something Indesign does, but in a very clumsy manner. I would hope they would reach out to some companies like Blurb, Modern Postcard , Vistaprint etc and have built in templates come with the final program. Blurb has an Indesign plugin that works really nicely and they should take that idea to as many online print services as they can so you can send directly from Publisher to the printer. Many Adobe users have been frustrated with Photoshop and Illustrator for many years so switching to a new, better designed app wasn't a hardship. Indesign is already in a place where it's used and liked.

A good start for a highly anticipated application. I would say they are a good 6 months away from a real release at this point providing they can get everything working with their current suite seamlessly. If I buy t and use it on release will depend on far they get with parity of features with Indesign. I will say they have a well deserved reputation so far to rising to this sort of challenge so I'm betting on this being another success for them.

Adobe CS4 Premium Design Suite

The good:

Much better integration between the softwares, some really useful features. All the Macromedia products (Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireowrks) have had long overdue overhauls. Flash is finally back in the hands of animators and not developers again. There are very interesting layout plans, pretty much consistent throught the suite now. Making it much easier to go from one to another without too much learning curve. The roundtrip editing in Dreamweaver from Photoshop is a long desired feature, saving lots of time. Installing the suite also seems to have solved many of the problems encounterd from the disastrous CS3 suite update which had a terrible bug in the install program, causing a really annoying crashing of Indesign.

The bad:

Some new features are a bit overplayed in the publicity as to thier usefullness in real life.The intelligent scaling for example, is great, but only works as advertised on projects that are very simular to the photos used to advertise it. If you really want to get the most of this feature you need to take the photos with the idea of using it in mind for the best results. For some reason Fireworks still uses the old Macromedia keyboard shortcuts (importing, for example). How hard it is to change that to the same shortcuts, Indesign and Photoshop use? It seems a no brainer.

The ugly:

As a company that uses many printers for many different clients, Behemoth like everyone else must deal with the extreme reluctance of print houses to update to the latest (or even the 3rd latest) versions of software. Adobe must also be well aware of this and still since Indesign CS2 have limited backwards compatibility. There is nothing more annoying than trying to remember what client's printer uses what version and having to keep several incarnations of the same software on your hard drive.. I must use 3 versions of Indesign now.. simply because there is no « save for : Indesign CS,CS2, CS3 ». This is simply mean spirited to users and makes print houses even less likely to update. Pagemaker and even earlier version of Indesign had a reasonable depth to the backwards compatibility. Not having this feature makes the nicely done but not so improved Indesign CS4 practically useless unless designing in house projects for your in house printers. I aslo managed to crash Fireworks by simply importing a really not all that complex Illustrator file. It's clear not that much attention is given to Fireworks developement beyond a nicer interface even though it complements Dreamweaver really well... I don't know why these features haven't been folded into Photoshop (even in an « extended » version like the 3D stuff is) if they really don't want to give Fireworks it's due.

Overall:

A decent update, though the price is foolishly high. I had wanted to get the Mastersuite collection, but there was no upgrade path for long time users who bought many things long before the suites came into being. We are left to buy each piece apart from the others at a much higher price... or buy a suite from scratch at a much higher price. I was looking forward to using Premiere with my copy of After Effects for all in house video work, but not at the ridiculous prices offered. Adobe is not alone in this, though Apple made a huge effort to make sure I had what I needed when they went the "suite" route. They even sent me a full version of the First Final Cut Pro Suite and not an upgrade version so I would not have more updating issues. Adobe needs to be willing to do the same if they want us all come on board. I won't be rushing to update any other Adobe products anytime soon. Not with this uncertain job market!