5 Mar 2021

Serif's Affinity Applications Continue To Challenge

British software publisher Serif has been around for more than three decades, but shifted into high gear in 2014 with the release of the first in a new line of Affinity applications, Affinity Designer. Affinity Photo was released in 2015 and Affinity Publisher in 2019.

Updates have been frequent, all three applications are now at version 1.9, and they include some attractive new features for both Windows and MacOS users. Performance improvements affect all three applications, and the Windows version can make full use of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for faster response, a feature that has been in the MacOS version for a while.

Affinity says that users with at least the April 2020 update and a graphics card with level 12.0 of Direct3D will see substantial improvements on pixel-based tasks such as adding filter effects, performing adjustments, and painting.

Serif began in 1987 with the objective of providing low-cost alternatives to high-end publishing and graphics packages. As with many Windows applications that began in the 1980s, the code became bloated and hard to maintain. In 2009, Serif decided to focus development on new applications for both Windows and MacOS. The change meant throwing away all the old code and starting from scratch, and the process took nearly five years before the first new application was released.

 Click any small image for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.

Affinity Designer

Designer is the Affinity application intended primarily for working with vector images, so that means images will contain lots of geometric objects with fill colors and stroke colors. Any object can be filled with a color or be transparent and can have an optional stroke of any color and width. A complex image may contain hundreds or thousands of individual shapes and, if a designer wants to fine-tune a project by changing the color of every object that has a particular fill, stroke, or combination of the two, the process could involve individually selecting a huge number of objects.

Designer 1.9 offers a much easier option. Select one object that you want to change, then choose Select Same from the Select menu. With all of the objects selected, changing the color is easy. There are also options to select items with the same shape, blend mode, transparency, stroke weight, name, and tag color.

Many modern applications allow the user to select which dialog boxes are visible, to position them as desired on the screen, and to group the dialogs. Version 1.9 of all three Affinity applications have added this feature and when the user has an arrangement that's just right for a specific set of tasks, it can be saved as a preset. Because one arrangement won't be right for all possible uses of the program, the applications allow multiple presets to be saved.

For example, I might want the Character dialog and the Paragraph dialog to be visible when working with a design that has a lot of text. These are not visible by default. I may also want the Glyph Browser, which is visible by default, to be in the same group. After opening the Character and Paragraph dialogs, it's easy to drag them into a single group and then drag the Glyph Browser into the same group. To make this preset available whenever needed, add a new preset in the Studio Presets menu.

If you have more than one monitor, some of the dialog boxes can be placed on the second monitor to keep them out of the way.

Designer 1.9 adds custom brushes and the number of options graphic artists have for creating highly customized patterns is remarkable. Text on a path isn't new, but it has received some substantial improvements in this edition. There are other features that are highly specialized, but are sufficiently esoteric that I'm not going to describe them here.

Underlying vector images in any application that can create them is a "wireframe" that clearly reveals each geometric shape. Sometimes it's helpful to be able to see the wireframe view and Designer uses the split-screen mode that's also present in Photo.

Also note that many of the new functions work in all three applications, so let's move on to the most complex of the three programs in the suite.

Affinity Publisher

Besides being the most complex of the three applications, Publisher is the most specialized application and probably the one that's used by the smallest number of people. One important point is that Affinity Publisher is not Adobe InDesign. The two applications would seem to have different target audiences. Where InDesign is used by large organizations that often need the many other applications in the Creative Cloud suite, Publisher seems to be designed for more modest settings.

That's not to say that Affinity Publisher is weak or underpowered. It is not! Publisher is surprisingly robust for an application that's only two years old. Development goes back a lot further, but the first edition of Publisher was released in 2019.

Having said that, the latest version of Publisher looks a lot like this small British company is targeting Adobe InDesign. While Publisher can't open InDesign (INDD) files directly, it can open InDesign IDML files. These are InDesign Markup Language files that were introduced with InDesign CS4. IDML files provide an interchange format for Adobe InDesign documents, as well as a way for third-party tools to modify and assemble InDesign documents. So InDesign documents saved in the backwards-compatible IDML format can be opened by Publisher.

Affinity Publisher can also open PDF, AI, PSD, SVG, EPS, and many other file formats. Version 1.9 includes many powerful, professional publishing capabilities such as double page spreads, live master pages and nested master pages, text wrapping with padding control, the ability to link text frames for text flow, and custom-shaped text frames.

Because Publisher, Designer, and Photo are so closely linked, resources created in one can be accessed from the other two, seemingly without leaving the active application. Live preflight checking is included to warn users when a problem with the document will affect print quality. The system will report poor image resolution, bleed hazards, overflowing text, spelling errors, missing images, and missing typefaces. When the document is ready to be delivered to a printing press, Publisher can package all of the document resources in a way that print shops expect.

Perhaps the most remarkable new features is the ability to merge text and images from data files. The example Serif gives is a job that involves printing admission tickets for an event. Each ticket contains a unique bar code and number. Publisher currently supports text files, comma-separated values files, JSON, and Excel files for input.

Affinity Photo

The photo application can smooth skin and reduce blemishes by using what's called frequency separation. There's also a specialized liquefy workspace that can be used to sculpt features. Effects such as blurs, lighting, distortions, and perspective corrections can all be applied without modifying the original image. If you decide later that you want the effect to be less prominent, you can scale it back or remove it.

Photographers who enjoy taking pictures of the night sky will like the ability to stack images. During processing, the software detects and corrects faulty pixels for better results. Serif says that a background removal filter can eliminate light pollution, light from the moon, and other atmospheric effects in addition to sensor defects.

Correcting color casts is one of the more vexing problems that photographers face, and the new Divide Blend offers new ways to address that old problem. It can also be used to enhance colors from an infrared image.

Photo makes good use of a split screen function to see before and after versions of an image when using a feature such as haze removal, but it's also helpful for nearly any modification. For contrast, color balance, saturation, and other adjustments, the user can decide whether the modification is better or worse.

Working with raw images gives access to all expected functions such as lens corrections; exposure, blackpoint, and white balance corrections; histograms; noise reduction; hot pixel removal; alerts that reveal blown-out white areas and dark areas where all detail is lost; the ability to edit EXIF data; importing XMP data from other photo applications; and the ability to add copyright information to files.

What's The Overall Plan?

So is Serif, with fewer than 100 employees around Nottingham in England, trying to get the best of Adobe's 20,000 employees worldwide? That's doubtful, highly doubtful when we consider Affinity's limited product line and Adobe's always increasing stable of applications. But the Affinity line can certainly provide robust options for those whose needs are satisfied by designer, photo, and publisher applications, and who can't afford the $50/month Creative Cloud fee. For $50 per month Creative Cloud users also have access to thousands of typefaces and Adobe's applications for user experience design, video editing, audio production, and more. The planet and user base are large enough for both companies to prosper.

Or perhaps Serif is hoping that Adobe will see value in their approach with the Affinity line and purchase the company.

Serif is currently running a sale on its applications. Although they have surprisingly low prices to begin with, all three applications are available for half price. Instead of being $50 each, they're $25 each — so the entire suite can be purchased for just $75.

In January, Serif announced the lower prices and an extended trial period — 90 days instead of 30. According to Managing Director Ashley Hewson, "For almost a year, the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to severely impact people all over the world, not least in the creative community." It's the same plan that Serif provided for a while in 2020, but it expired as the pandemic appeared to be getting better. "Sadly it's clear that the pandemic continues to have a serious impact", Hewson says. So so the company is offering the same price reductions and extended trial periods.

In this episode of the podcast, Chloe Cat occasionally played the role of an itinerant singer.

 Ignore the low price because there's a lot of power here

Given the price of admission, Serif's Affinity line of applications is remarkable. In fact, if you consider price and performance, the line is astounding. Even at full price, the Affinity apps are great values. The current half-price offering makes the combination irresistible. Updates have been free for all owners of any version 1.x application. Presumably there will be an upgrade fee when version 2.0 applications arrive. The applications all have perpetual licenses.
Additional details are available on the Serif's Affinity website.
The cat rating scale ranges from 0 cats (worst) to 5 cats (best).

Short Circuits

Enjoying The Magic Of Wikipedia

In the 1950s, we had a set of Encyclopædia Britannica at home. I still have it, and I might still occasionally use it for some topics, but Wikipedia is much faster and easier to use. It also may be more accurate.

I've been reading The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson, the long-time technology editor at the Wall Street Journal. The penultimate chapter discusses the web and Wikipedia, which are essential topics in understanding today's technology. But to learn about Wikipedia, a good source is Wikipedia.

Encyclopædia Britannica discontinued printing books in 2010 and switched on online and DVD offerings that contained about 80,000 articles in English. By contrast, Wikipedia has more than 30,000,000 articles in 287 languages.

 Click any small image for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.

At its most basic, "Wikipedia is a free, multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopedia created and maintained by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system. It is one of the 15 most popular websites as ranked by Alexa, as of January 2021 and The Economist newspaper placed it as the '13th-most-visited place on the web'. Featuring no advertisements, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded primarily through donations." Source: Wikipedia.

Anybody can submit or edit an article, and it would be reasonable to expect that this would lead to chaos and inaccuracy. But anyone can also correct inaccurate information. Unlike previous encyclopedias that required peer-reviewed articles, Wikipedia depends on crowd-sourced intelligence.

Early in Wikipedia's history, academics often reacted with scorn. Certainly Wikipedia must be full of errors! Well, certainly there are errors, but Britannica also has errors, even with peer-reviewed articles. But as early as 2005, rigorous comparisons showed that Wikipedia was generally as accurate as Britannica, and that it reacted faster to correct inaccurate information.

Isaacson described a situation that he saw firsthand: "Early on in Wikipedia's development, I was researching a book about Albert Einstein and I noticed that the Wikipedia entry on him claimed that he had traveled to Albania in 1935 so that King Zog could help him escape the Nazis by getting him a visa to the United States."

Isaacson knew that this information was inaccurate even though the article listed "references" to obscure Albanian websites where this was proudly proclaimed. Isaacson says he deleted the assertion from the article, only to watch it reappear. On the discussion page, he provided sources indicating that Einstein actually was at Princeton at the time and that he had a Swiss passport. "[T]enacious Albanian partisans kept reinserting the claim." Eventually "the edit wars ended, and the article no longer had Einstein going to Albania."

At the time, Isaacson says he didn't attribute success to the "wisdom of crowds" since the push for a fix had come from him. But then he realized that he, "like thousands of others, was in fact a part of the crowd, occasionally adding a tiny bit to its wisdom."

Nobody knows everything, but everybody knows something. That seems to be Wikipedia's primary operating principle. In fact, it generally illustrates the history of computing. Advances are rarely made by individuals working alone, but by cooperating with others. Isaacson's long book is full of stories that show how one person builds on the successes of another to develop something entirely new. Things that seem so obvious and commonplace to us today were beyond the imaginations of even forward-thinking people just a few decades ago.

Watch a motion picture from the 1950s or 1960s and you'll see how plot points often depend on one person's inability to contact another. In today's connected world, that's unthinkable. And if you'd like to explore the making of today's technology, reading The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution would be a great way to start.

Scam Artists Continue To Do Their Worst

The faces presented by scam emails change, but the underlying procedures have remained largely unchanged for decades. Spam filters and protective applications may help, but they won't fully protect you. Intelligence, skepticism, and a bit of paranoia are required.

Let's take a look at a couple of lame and laughable scam attempts that will still doubtless fool some people.

 Click any small image for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.

Bitcoin has been in the news recently because some people have lost their master password and, as a result, have lost the money they had stored in Bitcoin. Blockchain is the technology behind digital currencies, so anyone who holds digital currency will probably look closely at a message supposedly from Blockchain about losing access to the funds.

That's why it's important to look beyond the surface.

• Starting at the top of the message, it claims to be from "notify@support.blockchain.com.a", but the top-level domain (a) doesn't exist. The shortest top-level domains have two characters. Without going any further, you can dismiss a message like this as a phony.
• But there's more: The address the message was sent to is not one that I would use for a Blockchain account if I had one (which I don't).
• Still more: The message was sent on 17 February and it says my Blockchain account (which, as you know, I don't have) will expire the very next day. Any legitimate organization will provide at least a 30-day window during which the client can respond, and most will allow 60 days or even six months.
• If you want more, the inside address is "Hi there". No name. No account number. Any reputable organization will know your name or at least your login ID and will reference that in the message.
• That big blue "Update Now" button will take whoever clicks it to "https://mail.architekfoundation.org/wp-includes/IXR/". I obtained that information by hovering the mouse cursor over the button. Then I used Microsoft PowerShell to examine the code on the site. It would ask for my Blockchain user ID and password, which would then give the crooks full access to my money.

Thinking that a legitimate website might have been compromised, I tried to look at the website root on the server and Firefox warned me: "Firefox blocked this page because it may trick you into doing something dangerous like installing software or revealing personal information like passwords or credit cards."

So obviously the person who approaches every email message with caution and skepticism would know that the only rational thing to do would be to delete the message.

A day earlier I had received an email "from" Amazon. The message showed me a photograph of a $1600 computer and said it would be shipped soon.

I do have an Amazon Prime account, but this message wasn't sent to the address I use for Amazon transactions, so — as with the first message — I could have deleted it without further inspection. But I looked deeper.

• The message (1) claims to be from "cares@amazn-usshipping69.co", which is nonsense. Messages from Amazon are sent from "auto-confirm@amazon.com","shipment-tracking@amazon.com", and possibly a few other addresses, but they're always from "amazon.com", not "amazn-usshipping69.co". That's fatal error number two.
• Amazon messages always address me by name, not just (2) "Hello". This is yet another reason to ignore the message and delete it.
• The message says (3) "You order Acer Predator Triton 500 will be dispatched." That's ungrammatical in a way that even a fifth grader would recognize. The next line is even worse: "Note : If you don't order this item, call on 1-850 757 4527". US English does not place a space before a colon. The word "don't" should obviously be "didn't", and US English doesn't have us make a phone call by "calling on" a number. The number is incorrectly formatted and there's no period at the end of the sentence.
• The supposed recipient supposedly lives in (4) Fernley, Nevada, which is a real town that's northeast of Reno. The street address is either mangled or simply doesn't exist.
• I have seen a lot of messages from Amazon and, although this one contains Amazon branding, it looks nothing like any message I've ever received from Amazon.
• And one final clue: The message contains a lot of text formatted to look like links. Those are not in the screen shot. Hovering the mouse cursor over any of the "links" shows that they aren't really links. The only real option is the phone number. Call it at your peril.

It takes no special intelligence and virtually no specialized knowledge to identify these phony messages. All that's really required is that we make full use of our wetware — the stuff that resides between our ears.

Spare Parts

Download Updates Once And Install Everywhere Or Don't

It's not unusual for people to have more than one Windows computer at home. We have four (I think) and a fifth that's provided by my wife's employer. When Microsoft issues a large update, that can mean a lot of downloads.

That's not a big deal if you have a super-fast, unmetered connection. But if all of your computers share a connection that isn't as fast as you'd like or if they share a metered connection, you might wish that each computer didn't have to download the large update.

This is possible and has been for a long time. One person can pretend to be a network administrator, manually download the update, copy it to a thumb drive or CD, and then install it on all of the computers. That's not something that everyone is comfortable doing, so Microsoft came to the rescue with an option that eliminates multiple downloads.

 Click any small image for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.

To allow other computers on your home network to grab updates from whichever computer gets it first, open the Settings app on each computer and drill down to Update & Security > Delivery Optimization. Then be sure that "Allow downloads from other PCs" is turned on.

Alternatively, you might like playing games on your computer and you're annoyed when other computers on your home network drag down your system's performance by downloading a large update from your computer. If that's the case, visit the Delivery Optimization panel and turn off "Allow downloads from other PCs".

Developing A Doctor Who Habit

There's a joke going around the internet: If Watson isn't the most famous Doctor, then Who is. It's important to note the capitalizations and the ending punctuation. The appropriate response to the statement is "Yes."

I worked for a while with a Doctor Who fan. When I saw the program in the 1960s (first broadcast was 1963), I thought the effects and props were laughable and the Doctor was scary. Doctor Who's last broadcast was in 1989, but the BBC resurrected the Doctor in 2005. I have become a huge fan of the modern episodes and have also watched some of the earlier programs. Is this technology related? Well, what could have more technology than the TARDIS?

Should you decide to watch the latter-day Doctors, I'd like to save you some frustration. The BBC has released the episodes by "Series" to differentiate them from the "Season" designations for the earlier programs. The problem I've found is that the "full series" DVDs invariably omit the "specials" and anyone who misses those will be frustrated by missing essential information. When the specials are omitted from the season DVDs, they are provided on individual disks.

 Click any small image for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.

So here's my recommendation for ordering the DVDs that you may be able to obtain from your local library. If you're a long-time Doctor Who fan and see any errors in my suggested watching order, please let me know and I'll make the correction here.

The many Doctors Who >>

• Series 1 with the 9th Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) — all programs are included.
• Series 2 with the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) — The Christmas Invasion special is included on the DVDs.
• Series 3 with the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) — The Runaway Bride special is included on the DVDs.
• Series 4 with the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) — The Voyage of the Damned special is included on the DVDs.
• Series 4 specials with the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) — Four post-season specials are omitted.
• Watch Doctor Who. The Complete Specials, which includes The Next Doctor, Planet of the Dead, The Waters of Mars, and The End of Time – Parts One & Two before proceeding.
• Series 5 with the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith) — Omits post-season special.
• Watch A Christmas Carol before watching Series 6.
• Series 6 with the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith) — Omits post-season special.
• Watch The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe before watching the Series 7.
• Series 7 with the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith) — In-season and post-season specials are omitted.
• Watch The Snowmen between episodes 5 and 6 of Season 7.
• Watch The Day of the Doctor and The Time of the Doctor first.
• Series 8 with the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) — All programs are included.
• Watch Last Christmas before continuing to Series 9.
• Series 9 with the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) — Omits pre- and post-season specials.
• Watch The Husbands of River Song.
• Watch The Return of Doctor Mysterio before watching Series 10.
• Series 10 with the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) — Omits pre- and post-season specials.
• Watch Twice Upon a Time.
• Series 11 with the 13th Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) — Yes, the Doctor has regenerated as a woman. The post-season special is omitted.
• Watch "Resolution".
• Series 12 with the 13th Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) — Omits the post-season special.
• Watch Revolution of the Daleks.

That brings us up to Series 13, which hasn't yet been released on DVD.

Twenty Years Ago: Microsoft's First Handheld Failure

Microsoft has had little success with handheld devices, and that trend started in 2001 when the Palm Pilot crushed Windows CE devices.

I said "Who would have thought that the humble little Palm Pilot would defeat Microsoft's several attempts to create a pocket-size Windows machine! The Palm operating system does virtually nothing, but does it well. CE does a lot of things, but none of them very well."

Palm licensed the operating system so other manufacturers were able create Palm devices. That limited Palm's hardware sales, but resulted in more income from licensing fees. The success didn't last, though. Palm was purchased by Hewlett-Packard in 2010, but the company announced a year later that it would end production and support of Palm devices. Palm had been in business since 1991.