Among the most significant changes with this year’s Elements releases has little to do with new features but instead concerns the ways users purchase and own the software. While prior versions of Photoshop and Premiere Elements have been lifetime licenses — the user buys the software and then owns it indefinitely — this year’s release has moved to a three-year license term.
Inkscape recently also got decent multipage import and export for multipage pdfs and honestly it works great!
edit: I just realized I’ve been gushing about affinity for a while. sorry you can just read the next two paragraphs if you just want what’s relevant to you and not “hey you know what else is cool about affinity?”
yeah i haven’t used inkscape but designer 2.x blew my mind. I had a job recently to change the design of a flyer and my only source was a 2-page PDF. I opened it in illustrator and it just insisted on outlining all text from page 1 and keeping all text for page 2 but in different text objects for every line.
tried it in affinity designer, I noticed there’s an option that says “Favor editable text over fidelity”. voila. both pages with selectable text in a single text box per column. if I don’t select the option it does the line by line separate text object thing but for both pages as well, so it’s still better than illustrator. idk why illustrator insists that the first page cannot possibly be interpreted as text.
also corner rounding, offsetting paths and adding transparency gradients being nondestructive tools rather than the tedious and/or destructive methods in illustrator is enough for me to stick to affinity.
the only things I’m missing is the repeat action command and the view bleeds toggle, which is mind blowing that it didn’t exist in designer. there are dumb workarounds but I don’t like that. also more controls over swatches would be nice, like why don’t they have folders…
still, other than these maybe three things which are not deal breakers for me, I prefer affinity pretty close to 100% of the time now. it’s faster too, and being able to switch personas for most use cases rather than launching Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator at the same time is a godsend.
they also innovated and came up with the patented new concept called Consistency™. apparently if you’re one company that publishes several pieces of software, you can just make it so the same exact tools work the same exact way across all your software. genius!
meanwhile adobe doesn’t even have a standard drop shadow effect for all adobe products.