Serif / Affinity is one of those rare companies that's able to write user applications that can kernel panic a mac. Their apps' palettes change size on their own by single digit pixels. Their apps don't correctly handle screen connectivity changes, and even with their studio presets, the tools palette doesn't get captured by that function...

So, I'm not inclined to just take it on faith that it's a "safe" install.

Right, so from that it sounds like it's not like the experience of V2 switching between Photo and Developer.

And this is different from Serif, how?

I find it had to imagine the software is going to be any more janky than Affinity v2 was. I'm going to look at Scribus over the next week or two. I'm sick of documents in orphan formats because of corporate shenanigans.

I was a GoLive user for a looong time, it was a MUCH better product than Dreamweaver in every respect *except* Dreamweaver could build front ends for database driven sites, being tightly integrated with ColdFusion, and that was very popular at the time (also the Windows version of GoLive was less than stellar at a critical moment in history, so I hear).

Currently having our own Canva moment in the HTML space, with Espresso having launched a new "full of AI" version (after 2 years of no updates or replies to support emails etc) that looks like the product has been bought by a dodgy "stick in AI then flip an upgrade" group, who are offering flash discounts on upgrades only a couple of weeks after launch.

Perhaps the thing I find most offputting about Affinity 3 is that I don't think Serif ever delivered on a merchantable-quality product with Affinity 2. I don't think Serif ever gave me my money's worth for the purchase I already made; the product was never stable, its features never bug-free, it was always at best pre-release / beta software, and I have trouble forgiving that fact.

The optimist in me suggests many of the problems with the 2.x era may have been because they only just got it released, before they had to shift priority to 3.0, leaving a skeleton crew on the app, and maybe with everyone, the "A" team working on it, the things we note - studio specific colour schemes etc might be possible.

At 10 minutes in to the video, the thing that strikes me most is that the basic UI looks a big thicker, a bit less attenuated (like the up / down arrows on the drop lists), though that may be an artefact of a retina screen vs 1440p screen i use.

The single app... I use spaces heavily, I have Publisher on one space, Photo in another, so maybe not as great a thing, unless you can have multiple instances of the app running.

A free suite, with Canva as the collaboration back end would certainly be an interesting proposition.

Much in the same way as "pirated creative suite" was the way a lot of people paying for creative cloud now attained a position in life where they could afford it.

I'd almost bet on "free and open source" except that the first thing I suspect would happen is for the open source community to largely ignore the apps, and try to make replacements for Canva's service.