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14 Jul 2019 - Podcast #651 - (21:34)
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Software developer Serif has been redesigning PhotoPlus, DrawPlus, and PagePlus under the "Affinity" name for several years. Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer have been available since 2017 and the release of Affinity Publisher completes the set. A feature called StudioLink combines the three applications in a surprising way and the Affinity series of products are no longer Windows-only applications as were the earlier versions; each has a MacOS version.
There are other surprises. The price, for example: $50 each for Publisher, Designer, and Photo with introductory prices of $40 each. Publisher includes 5 typefaces from RetroSupply at no extra cost. There are also IOS versions of Designer and Photo for the IPad. The IOS applications are each priced at $20, with introductory prices of $16.
The price makes Affinity applications attractive to those who are currently using a word processor to create documents that would be more suited to desktop publishing software. Small businesses, for example, where someone may struggle with Word to create a monthly newsletter but where the budget doesn't exist to license Adobe's Creative Cloud suite of applications.
It's unlikely that Publisher, Designer, and Photo will displace InDesign, Illustrator, Lightroom, and Photoshop in large organizations with a staff of graphic design professionals or in advertising or design agencies — in part because Adobe is so entrenched in such offices and in part for other reasons. (See the sidebar for that.)
Any company that tries to compete with Adobe faces a big challenge, in part because few companies or creatives need only a video editor or only an audio editor or only a website designer or only a page layout program or only a design application or only a photo manager or only a photo editor.
Audio is often repurposed for use on the web or in video. Photos are repurposed for various media. Page designs are repurposed for use in larger publications. For these reasons, any true competitor must have at least a photo management application, a photo editing application, a pixel-level photo editor, an audio editor, a website design application, a page layout application, a typesetting application, and a video editor (with pre- and post-processing tools). The number of companies that can field a team of applications like that, other than Adobe, is zero.
Some companies compete with Adobe's photo applications, but have nothing for video or website development; others have audio processing applications, but nothing for page layout or publication design; and some have website development tools, but no coverage in any of the other categories.
The Earth, although it's a small planet orbiting a third-class star, still has a lot of individuals and a organizations that may not need the full range of applications Adobe has to offer. These individuals and organizations are the ones that Adobe's competitors often seek to develop for.
I started by watching enough of the instructional videos to establish a basic understanding how the application works and how it differs from other publishing tools. I wanted to create a book-length document, so I started with Project Gutenberg and downloaded The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, which is now in the public domain. Long documents offer challenges not seen in shorter publications.
The plain text file needed some minor formatting changes before I brought it into Publisher, so I used UltraEdit to convert hard returns within each paragraph to spaces so that the text would wrap. This process took less than a minute. Next, I pasted the plain text into Microsoft Word and used Find/Replace to convert straight quotes to typographic quotes. That took another minute. I then had a 74-page Word document that was ready for Publisher.
I started by setting the base document to US letter-size paper and the type of document to print. Serif is a British company, so paper sizes default to European sizes (A1 through A10) and the default measurement is millimeters. US paper sizes are present and you can define your own paper size. Measurements can be converted to inches or, my preference, picas and points. I chose to link images instead of embedding them, the page would have a one-inch bottom margin and three-quarter-inch margins on the other three sides. It would use a facing-pages layout with the first page on the right and two columns of text per page.
After defining a paragraph style for the body text and for headline-1, I used the master pages feature to set up a footer with the chapter title and the page number.
Because I've worked with a lot of other publishing applications since the mid 1980s, most of the settings were more or less where I expected them to be and did more or less what I thought they would. Along the way, I found that Publisher has a lot of high-end features for an application that also has such a surprisingly economical price tag.
By high-end features, I mean capabilities such as:
The ability to edit components in Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer without leaving Affinity Publisher. This feature (StudioLink) requires that the latest versions of Photo and Designer be installed. The StudioLink icons are in the upper left corner of the interface and it is such a significant feature because it eliminates the need to open an image editor or a design application to modify existing images and then update them in the publication. Changes made to photographs are non-destructive because the modifications are committed on layers and the untouched original is always retained. 
The ability to import text and graphics into the Publisher document to make sharing the document with others easier or to incorporate them by reference to limit the size of the publication file. This is also helpful if some of the document resources are maintained on a network server.Affinity Publisher has been in development for a long time and Serif's managers should be recognized for avoiding the temptation to push out an application that wasn't quite ready. There are opportunities for improvement, of course, and some inconsistencies that should be resolved, but overall it a solid new product.
You can take a look at The Wizard of Oz, my incomplete text project.
Can Affinity Publisher Replace Adobe InDesign?For some users, maybe, but it's unlikely for publications, large design studios, and companies with communications and design departments. There's just too much inertia. Some have referred to Affinity Designer as the InDesign killer. That seems improbable despite the application's extensive feature set and modest cost. But even if Affinity Designer doesn't win over the big shops, anyone who's struggling to create publications with Word or Microsoft Publisher should take a look.
Additional details are available on the Serif website.
Manufacturers of hardware reviewed on TechByter Worldwide typically loan the hardware and it must be returned at the end of the review period. Developers of software reviewed on TechByter Worldwide generally provide a free not-for-resale (NFR) license so that all features of the application will be unlocked.
Desktop publishing (or desktop typesetting) has been around for a long time and because this week's main story examines a new player in the marketplace, it might be worth taking a few minutes to consider some of those earlier applications.
Although some claim that the technology dates back to the 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Corporation (PARC), I don't entirely buy that. In the mid-1980s, Aldus released PageMaker and about the same time the GEM-based Ventura Publisher was introduced for MS-DOS computers. These two applications were the early leaders. Ventura, although demonstrably superior to PageMaker, suffered through years of mis-management by Xerox and Corel before eventually being discontinued.
In the meantime, Adobe acquired PageMaker and FrameMaker and was working on an application called InDesign. Both PageMaker and FrameMaker were eliminated as InDesign development proceeded and included specialized features that those applications had offered. This left only Quark XPress as competition and Quark seemed to be actively attempting to annoy its own customers. Quark had virtually all of the desktop typesetting market well into the 1990s, but Quark's market share is currently in single digits or low double digits. InDesign is the winner. Game over.
At a time when Quark had a virtual lock on the market, Adobe set out to create what I'm told was referred to internally as a Quark killer. InDesign turned out to be almost exactly that, but along the way it also killed Ventura Publisher (or, more accurately, aided its suicide).
Desktop typesetting isn't entirely about saving money by cutting out typesetting operations, but it had that effect, too. Thousands of small typesetting shops that existed in the 1980s were long gone by 2000. For me and for a lot of people who were adopting the technology in the 1980s, it was more about speeding the process and taking control of the end-to-end operation. Instead of consuming several weeks to prepare a newsletter, it became possible to complete the process of creating a press-ready design in just a few days. As the technology improved and we gained the ability to output PDF documents that printers could use directly to make plates, it was possible to have an idea for a publication in the morning and to hand out finished documents from a print shop in the afternoon.
Technologies developed by Adobe made desktop publishing a reality. Scalable Adobe PostScript fonts built into $7000 (nearly $17,000 in today's dollars) LaserWriter printers allowed designers to proof files at low resolution and then send the file out for high-resolution output. Eventually some laser printers (with expensive add-ons) were able to output 1200-dpi pages. Today's 1200-dpi laser printers start around $400 and 600-dpi multifunction printers can be found for less than $200.
Apple computers still have the largest market share for design and publishing professionals even though Windows-based computers have been capable of running design applications for decades.
Do you occasionally see 404 (page not found or server not found) errors when you try to connect to a website? This can happen even for common sites such as Google and even when the site is up and running normally. It's not your fault, but it is something you can fix.
Probably the most common cause of this error is nameservers that belong to your internet service provider (ISP). ISPs have notoriously bad domain name system (DNS) servers and the good news is that you don't have to accept the poor service. The even better news is that it costs nothing to switch to better nameservers.
The two best known providers of third-party DNS services are OpenDNS and Google. I've used both but currently use Google's nameservers, in part because they are popular. If you want to try out new nameservers, you'll need to determine where to make the change. Two common options exist:
Making the change is easy either way, so let's take them in order.
Start by opening (1) Settings > Network and Internet > Status, select (2) Change Adapter Options, look through the list of connections shown and (3) right-click the active connection.
From the drop-down menu, (4) select Properties. This will open the Cable Router Properties dialog.
Be sure that (5) Internet Protocol Version 4 is selected, then (6) click Properties.
On the General tab of Internet Protocol Version 4 Properties, (7) Obtain DNS Server Address Automatically will probably be selected. This means that the DNS will use whatever your ISP provides. Instead, select Use the Following DNS Server Address and fill in the IP address for OpenDNS or Google servers:
Then click OK until all of the dialog boxes have closed and either flush the DNS cache with this command from a CMD prompt run as the Administrator:
ipconfig /flushdns
or just reboot the computer.
Making a change on the router will affect all computers on your home network, so one change fixes all.
Start by opening your router's control panel. Home routers almost always use IP address 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1. You'll need to log on. Virtually all router manufacturers use "admin" as the user name and "password" as the password. If you haven't changed the password, do it now.
Also, this would be a good time to see if there's a firmware update for the router. Most control panels make it obvious when an update is available. If you find one, install it. This will require that you restart the router, so do that and then return here. Before restarting the router, be sure that nobody on the network will lose data when the connection drops.
Router manufacturers create many different interfaces. The one I'm using for illustration is from a Netgear Nighthawk X10 R9000 router. What you see will differ, but the setting you need to find will probably be on the basic interface under the internet category.
Find the selection that discusses the Domain Name Server Address.
Get Automatically from ISP will probably be selected. This means that the DNS will use whatever your ISP provides. Instead, select Use These DNS Servers and fill in the IP address for OpenDNS or Google servers:
If your router offers a "third DNS" option, you can safely ignore it.
After you make the changes, the router will reboot, so be sure that nobody on the network will lose data when the connection drops and before you reboot the router.
Google Backup and Sync is a versatile application that makes it possible to share working copies of files with others or to make it possible to update a file from multiple computers. I keep files that I'm working on for TechByter on Google Drive and also keep files there when I know that I may need to access them from other computers. Usually the process works flawlessly, but sometimes it doesn't.
I started seeing unwelcome messages this week, telling me that files created on an IOS tablet couldn't be synced, so at first I thought it might be an Apple problem. Then files created on an Android device wouldn't sync. And files created on another Windows machine. That pointed me either to the desktop computer or Google Backup and Sync. As it turned out, the problem appears to have been both.
Permissions seemed to be the place to start and I found that my user and the system didn't have the permissions necessary to create, copy, run, or delete files in the local directory. Attempting to modify the permissions generated an error, but logging on as Administrator allowed me to give the proper permissions to the processes that needed them. Still things weren't working properly.
Google support recommended uninstalling and reinstalling the Backup and Sync Application. In last week's program I mentioned changes that Google planned for Drive and Photos. The timing of this problem causes me to suspect some linkage with those changes, but I can't prove it.
Sorting the problem out consumed roughly eight hours over several days, but some of that time includes processes that simply had to run and didn't require my attention. So the initial sync operation following the re-installation of Backup and Sync took more than an hour, but I was able to work on other tasks while that process ran in the background.
The United States continues to lag behind the rest of the developed world in internet speed, including mobile. The 2019 Speedtest US Mobile Performance Report by Ookla says mobile speeds are better, but still nothing to write home about.
The report says the US ranks between Spain and Saudi Arabia for download speed, but sits in 94th place for upload speeds, between Angola and Poland. But Mobile operators are starting to implement 5G in some of the largest cities and that is improving speeds in those cities. Ookla monitors internet speed for both wired and wireless systems. You can check your own internet speed here. During the first half of 2019, more than 4.1 million unique mobile user devices were used to perform more than 11.5 million consumer-initiated cellular network tests on Speedtest apps. Ookla has analyzed those tests to determine the mobile operators with the fastest and most consistent networks across the nation.
The report shows that AT&T is fastest overall, followed by T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint. Rhode Island has the best overall speeds, followed by Minnesota, DC, Delaware, and Massachusetts. The slowest states are Wyoming, Mississippi, Iowa, Alaska, and Oklahoma.
The report concludes "Over the next 12 months we will likely see many more 5G roll-outs, and almost certainly the first nationwide 5G network.... The use of 10 Gbps fiber circuits will hopefully become the norm for 5G sites, at least in the urban markets. All of this should increase speeds and improve coverage and quality of mobile service across the nation."