Affinity Designer and Adobe Photoshop for iPad
With the resounding success and universal praise heaped upon last year’s launch of Affinity Photo for the iPad, it was only a matter of time before its companion app, the popular vector illustration tool, Affinity Designer, was brought to the platform.
After publishing a teaser almost a year ago to the day, Affinity Designer is making its iOS App Store debut. To celebrate, developer Serif is launching the app at a special $13.99 introductory price, a 30% discount off the full price.
Like Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer brings desktop-class high-level capabilities to iPad users. After using it, I can say that it is unequivocally one of the most impressive iOS apps I’ve ever used. Serif has taken full advantage of the iPad’s multi touch gestures in a way that allows users to pull off all sorts of quick shortcuts without delving deep into the app’s deep menu set.
I expect @affinitybyserif will have to switch to a subscription model eventually, but until they do, even a full-featured Photoshop for iPad is going to have a tough time competing.
No plans for subscription here!
Affinity Designer on iPad might be a life changer for my design process. I usually only did sketching and research, now I can consider doing the mockups too.
Pretty neat.
Mark Gurman and Nico Grant (via Steve Troughton-Smith, Hacker News, MacRumors):
The software developer is planning to unveil the new app at its annual MAX creative conference in October, according to people with knowledge of the plan. The app is slated to hit the market in 2019, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private product plans.
[…]
The new versions of the apps will allow users to run full versions of the programs on Apple’s iPad and continue edits on different devices, the people said. The moves are similar to ones Microsoft Corp. has made as part of its software and services-focused turnaround in recent years.
Adobe’s customers, particularly in media and entertainment, are increasingly working on tablets rather than desktop computers, and have asked the company for the capability to make “edits on the fly” to their creative projects, Belsky said.
It remains unclear that anyone wants full Photoshop or similar on iPad, and I’d expect more of a Lightroom CC/Rush play (stripped down, rethought). We’ll see.
Update (2018-07-18): See also: Dominik Wagner.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
> It remains unclear that anyone wants full Photoshop or similar on iPad
There are very definitely people out there who want that. The question is how many of these people there are, and how many there are going to be in the future, and the answer, sadly, is "it depend on Apple."
BTW, I don't know how Serif went from making mediocre Windows apps to creating two of the best design tools for Macs, but something happened at that company around 2016, and I'd love for somebody to tell that story.
Serif is on the roll indeed.
Adobe's subscription model pushed many long time users away and that helped Serif a lot.
For Adobe it would be more important to have XD for iPad, because that's the missing pro app type on iOS.
Affinity Designer is great, but it's not as good for UI design as Sketch or XD.
