Affinity, the creative software platform, just merged all of its apps (Photo, Designer and Publisher) into one and made it completely free forever, according to its CEO who announced it today on social media.
Full disclosure, I had never heard of Affinity until literally just a couple of minutes ago. I just randomly saw the launch video on social media. Apparently they were acquired by Canva, not long ago, which I have heard of, but never used. I know some people who use Canva though.
I’ve heard many people like @henry-fisher from Tech Lore complain about Adobe. I personally hate that I have to be logged into an Adobe account to use their free apps. I shouldn’t need the internet to edit a document or a photo on my computer.
For a while now, I have been looking for a good app that would allow me to watermark personal documents with tiled text and would be privacy-friendly.
QUESTIONS:
To people who use Affinity:
Is it the solution I’m looking for?
Is it privacy-friendly? Do you constantly need to be logged on the internet to use it?
And to those who’ve been wanting to quit Adobe, is this good news?
I see many people in the comments of the announcement saying that if the product is free, you are the product…are they right?
They just announced this. It will or I imagine should take a few days to really evaluate this tool and run Wireshark on it to see how much data it really collects while being free.
I don’t think this is a privacy friendly product at all seeing it is from Canva. Plus there is no Linux app and I don’t trust an app maker on any privacy if they do not support Linux. This can certainly be an alternative to the terrible Adobe and I am for more options but unless this can fully function at capacity with all that it can do while not connected to the internet, I would not classify this as a privacy friendly option. I’m sure someone will soon test this with LuLu or Little Snitch.
Hmm. This is really interesting. I have been an Affinity user since they launched, and I use Affinity Designer 2 literally all the time…
I was not very happy about the Canva acquisition when it happened. This does look somewhat promising though.
With Affinity 2 that I use, you need to log in to activate the software, but then it works perpetually offline. I want to find out what the answer to this question is on the newer version.
Since it’s free I suppose I’ll download and compare when I get a chance. I know @jordan is also an Affinity user, and I recently got @em to try it out for some stuff we are working on, so maybe they will have time to share their thoughts here sometime too
Yes, if you need something similar to Photoshop that’s free it’s pretty much the only option. (No GIMP isn’t actually a usable alternative for professional usecases)
I don’t think it’s privacy invasive and it’s certainly better than by Adobe by a long shot. It doesn’t make many connections (mainly just downloading assets from Affinity or checking for updates) it does give you the option to disable analytics too. However you do need a Canva account to use the new Affinity app, which is governed by their privacy policy which isn’t great.
I did notice that they added Sentry telemetry though as it was making connections on first opening the application. However that can be easily blocked using DNS or a Application Layer firewall.
After logging into the Affinity app you can restrict it’s network connections and it functions completely fine. (I’ve tested this with Little Snitch).
Yeah I think it’s good, they are definitely trying to eat into Adobe’s market share especially with the move to a freemium model. It’s still not as good as Photoshop though so they still have work to do to bring it up to par.
As for whether this is a good update, I think it’s phenomenal from a workflow perspective. I frequently find myself bouncing in-between Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo and it was quite a slow process switching between them. Having everything in a single app is a significant plus for me personally. I am not interested in any of the AI integrations and it’s pretty easy to just remove it from the workspace switcher.
I’m not sure what features have been moved behind a paywall as I am using a Canva Premium account, but I have heard that some of the machine learning features might require a Canva Premium account (I can’t check so your mileage may vary but these features were included in the V2 version of Affinity)
Yeah I know but it does come with some drawbacks unfortunately like you can’t switch personas. I think the studio link feature was one of the highlights of Publisher.
I like some of the different more specific selection options (select from layer), and Affinity Photo has Live filters but Affinity Designer has Warp instead.
Affinity Photo also has all those extra Personas for photo editing which can be handy like Liquify, Develop and Tone mapping.
I also use the object selection in Photo a lot which isn’t available in Designer.
