Can a relatively new $50 vector editor beat the well established Adobe Illustrator? Probably not, but it might be just right for some users. Affinity is a new brand name from Serif, a company that's been in business since 1987. Serif PagePlus was the company's first application, a low cost desktop typesetting program. Development is underway for a Affinity Publisher, which will take the place of the older application. In addition to Affinity Designer, the company offers Affiity Photo, which was reviewed on an earlier program.
That $50 fee, by the way, is a one-time charge, not a monthly rental.
Some people despise the software-as-a-service model as used by companies such as Adobe and Microsoft (for Office). Microsoft takes a different approach for the operating system in that the user pays once and receives updates for the life of the device.
The aproach used for Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Cloud involves a monthly rental fee. In general, the fee is less than the cost of buying an update every 18 months or so, but some users skipped one or more versions and upgraded only when an irresistable new feature was added.
The subscription model means that all users are on the same version and everybody receives feature and security updates as soon as they're released. Clearly there are advantages to both business models.
But consider this: Perhaps you primarily use Adobe's photo applications (Photoshop, Bridge, Camera Raw, and Lightroom) so you're enrolled in the $10 per month photography program. But occasionally you need to work on some vector images. Adding Illustrator to the package would double the monthly fee. Creative Cloud is clearly a cost-effective plan for anyone who uses at least 3 of the various applications regularly. The full program includes 20 applications from photography, design, and websites to audio, video, and publishing. But some people would prefer to pay once and be done with it.
Afinity Designer might be just what someone like that is looking for.
Another use case might be for someone who has never found Adobe Illustrator to be a very usable program. I know that these people exist because I hear from them.
As with Affinity Photo, the Designer product has a Persona toolbar. There are several other toolbars, but most of those will be familiar to users of other programs. The Persona toolbar has 3 options: Draw, Pixel, and Export. These allow you to switch from one overall set of tools to another with a single click.
The Draw persona is where you'll start and where you'll spend most of your time. This is the persona that's displays the tools needed to create or edit vector objects. The Pixel persona opens up additional editing tools that work at the individual pixel level -- brushes and retouching tools, for example. The Export persona will be the final step, when you're ready to export the image for use in other applications.
The Persona selector is part of the default tool bar (1) while the Context tool bar (2) will contain options that are relevant to the currently selected object and tool from the main tool bar (3). A useful Hints tool bar (4) provides guidance on what you can do and the expanded tool bar on the right (5) displays settings.
Affinity Designer can import and export projects from Photoshop. Illustrator files can also be placed in new Design document or opened for editing. Scalable vector (SVG) files are also supported.
Overall, it would be difficult to find a more comprehensive vector editor for just $50.
For more information, check out the Affinity Designer website.
Three years. That's how long one of the 4TB HGST disk drives in my system lasted. Whether the drive had a 3-year warranty or a 5-year warranty wasn't as important as whether I could recover the files that were on it.
The first indication that there was a problem was the Windows sound that tells you a USB device has gone off-line. A little research revealed that the device that had gone off-line was a disk drive, one of four drives in an external USB3 cabinet. All of the drives were present when I rebooted the system, but Crystal Disk Info told me there was a problem.
It wasn't a that the drive was approaching failure, but that it had failed. SMART is intended to give the user some hint that a drive is starting to fail. Not this time.
Although I knew the drive had been backed up, I wanted to make sure that any new files on the drive (one physical drive and two logical drives) had been backed up. Hoping that it would run long enough to copy all files to another drive, I plugged in another USB drive and started to copy files. The process failed after a few minutes, so I shut down the computer and removed the failed disk drive.
Then I ordered a new disk drive, but not one from HGST. HGST was once "Hitachi Global Storage Technologies", but is now owned by Western Digital. In 2015, Western Digital announced a decision from China's Ministry of Commerce that enabled the company to integrate most of its HGST and WD subsidiaries under Western Digital Corporation but both HGST and WD product brands must be maintained in the market until October of this year.
The failed disk holds drives F and H. F is devoted primarily to music files, some brief videos I've created, the LIghtroom Catalog files, and the local copy of Google Drive files. All of these are backed up to CrashPlan and also to a separate hard drive that is refreshed once a week, but Google Drive was unhappy about being unable to find its files, so I recreated that directory on drive I. H is mainly a scratch disk, but it also holds some client videos and temporary files for Audition.
I didn't need any of the missing directories immediately, although the missing Lightroom catalog meant that I couldn't use LIghtroom until I had replaced the drive. Had I needed to use Lightroom before the replacement disk arrived, I could have pointed it at a local backup copy of the catalog or restored the backup to a different drive and re-established the link as I'd done with Google Drive.
The replacement drive, a Western Digital Black 2TB 7200 RPM SATA rated at 6 gigibits per second with 64MB of cache, arrived on Wednesday and recovery was just as easy as recovery should be. After shutting down the computer and the disk enclosure, I pushed the new drive into the empty slot, closed the door, and booted the computer.
Some drives are hot-swappable, meaning that they can be removed from and added to a disk cabinet while the system is powered. That should be the case with a disk cabinet designed for a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) setup, but I didn't want to take a chance on hot-swapping because the cabinet is both inexpensive and non-RAID.
When the computer started, it notified me that a new uninitialized disk was present and told me that I needed to initialize it. That process takes just a few seconds and then the drive could be partitioned and the partitions could be formatted as drives F and H. That process consumed less than 5 minutes.
I had a local copy of drive F, so restoring the files took about 2 hours. Because drive F contains Lightroom's catalog files, I tested by opening the program. No drama.
Then it was time to restore drive H and I have no local copy of that. The download from CrashPlan ran all evening, overnight, and most of the next day. I've decided to create a local backup of H that will be updated once a week. In most cases, that backup will take only long enough for GoodSync to confirm that nothing has changed.
So once again, backup saves data and eliminates heartburn.
Click Control-N to open a new browser or Control-T to open a new tab in your browser and you'll see a screen that's probably little more than useless. There's an option for Chrome that may interest you, though.
"Infinity New Tab" is an add-on for Chrome and it might be enough to convince you that the new tab function is worthwhile after all because it adds many useful functions.
The default search engine, of course, is Google. Initially I had 2 pages (see the small circular icons near the bottom of the screen). The pinwheel at the bottom is used to switch the background image and the plus icon near the top makes it possible to add icons.
Adding the Infinity New Tab component is easy enough: Click the menu option at the top right of the browser, choose Settings, click Extensions in the menu on the left, scroll all the way down to "Get more extensions" and click it, search for "infinity", choose "Intinity New Tab", and click "Add to Chrome".
Then when you click the new page icon, use ^T, or ^N, you'll have the Infinity New Tab display. Most users immediately type a new URL or choose something from their bookmarks, but now you'll have some useful new options. Or maybe you won't. The initial layout might not be exactly what you want, but it's easy to add or remove icons.
You can discard icons you don't want. My second page had Baidu, a Chinese website. Not being able to speak Chinese, I wanted to eliminate this icon. When you right-click any icon on the screen, all icons will display an "X" marker that allows you to remove it.
You'll be making several changes, so you might want to back up what you've done. If you have more than one computer, backing up one computer's settings and restoring to another computer is helpful.
To do this, you'll need to sign up for a free account. In the Infinity New Tab page, click the Settings icon if it's present. If not, click the + icon near the top right and then click Settings > General > Sign in or Register. Click Register and then enter an email address, password, and the CAPTCHA code to register. Then you'll be able to restore your settings to another computer, even if one computer runs Windows and the other is a Mac.
Once you've eliminated the icons you won't use, you can add ones that you will. You have several options. If you're already on the page you want to add, just click the Infinity icon.
Or you can click the + icon and then select from one of the recommended items (you'll find quite a few), or add a custom item. To add your own item, choose Add Item > Custom and then paste or type a URL into the field. Choose the color you want to use for the badge and Click Add.
Maybe you don't always want to use Google. You can set up Infinity New Tab to search Wikipedia or TechByter Worldwide. To do this, just find the search engine's (or search function's) URL and then add it.
If you want to give it a try, choose Settings -> Extensions in the Chrome menu.
Previously I mentioned that I bought a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard and mouse. The mouse behaved badly from the start, but it wasn't Microsoft's fault. Let's start with the symptoms and then I'll explain what was going on.
The scroll wheel made the mouse seem like it was being chased by a cat. A single click of rotation would cause the screen to scroll a full page in just about any program. The Sculpt devices have their own control panel and four settings exist for the scroll wheel: Vertical scrolling (on or off), a speed selector if scrolling is on, accelration, and a rate selector if acceleration is on. I tried several settings and found that response wasn't quite so frantic if acceleration was off, but it was still too jerky even with the scrolling speed on the lowest setting.
When I looked in the control panel, I found that some of the settings had been taken over by the specialized Sculpt applications, as expected, but whe wheel setting had a selector. The default was 3. When it set it to 1, the mouse acted normally. Problem solved, I thought -- but every time I restarted the computer the mouse was once again being chased by a very hungry cat.
This mouse it attached to a notebook computer that has a Synaptics touch pad and some research led me to a suggestion to change a setting for that device. It's a Registry edit with key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTP\Install. Find the value DeleteUserSettingsOnUpgrade the discussion on TenForums said and change the value to 0.
I did that and the settings stuck following the next reboot. Problem solved, I thought once again, but later in the week the jerky response returned and the Control Panel's mouse wheel setting had been set back to 3.
