With the year coming to an end let's make a list of the best apps, tools, and plugins or features available for the Surface Family as of December 2019. These threads have been super helpful to me over the years but I think the last major thread like this was a couple years ago.
OS:Windows 10 Pro 20H2 OS Build 19042.789 + Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.551.0 Rig:AMD FX 8350 and AMD Radeon (R9 380 Series) Settings Version 20.11.2 Radeon Settings Version 2020 20.1.03 ) + Wacom Intuous 4M with driver 6.3.41-1. Today we are going to take a look at Affinity Designer, an awesome $50 alternative to Illustrator and Inkscape. It's an excellent easy to use vector graphic.
Integration with your Affinity app
After restarting the app, turning the dial while the Move Tool is selected will rotate the document in the view. Click the dial to reset the document's orientation.
With one of the Pixel, Erase or various other pixel-based brush tools selected, click Surface Dial to choose which attribute (brush width, accumulation, flow, and hardness) is adjusted by rotating the Dial. These tools display a large graphical overlay that provides clear feedback.
If a tool does not provide predefined Surface Dial gestures, you can assign choices in Windows' Settings app. Your custom commands are available from an on-screen menu, which appears when you press and hold down on the Dial.
Some commands in your Affinity app do not have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them by default. You will need to give them shortcuts in the app's Keyboard Shortcuts preferences before configuring Surface Dial to invoke them.
Example custom commands for Surface Dial in Affinity apps
Below are examples of how you might use Surface Dial in your workflow to control brush size and layer order. The walkthroughs at the bottom of this page explain how to implement these and other personalizations.
Affinity Designer Tutorial
In the left example above, rotating the Dial moves the current layer back or forward progressively in the layer stack, while clicking it sends the layer all the way to the back.
Affinity Designer Surface Pro 10
In the right example, rotating the Dial adjusts brush size (as long as the appropriate tool is selected). The Click shortcut toggles the Brushes Panel; normally there is no keyboard shortcut assigned to this action, so you'll need to set the same key combination in your Affinity app's preferences.
Affinity Designer Pc
James Young, 4 years ago
I use a Surface Pro 3 + external monitor with:
Adobe Creative Cloud
Affinity Designer (replaces Sketch which was the only thing I miss from Mac)
Sublime Text
Most of my visual work is done in a mix of Affinity Designer and sometimes Photoshop then for things like wireframing I use Moqups in a browser so no issues there.
We primarily use Kiln for version control as we're an Umbraco CMS dev company so one of the reasons for me going back to Windows was because working in a Windows VM on a Mac to avoid file versioning conflicts/issues with version control was a pain.
Your concern about Sketch is pretty much the one thing I really missed when I switched a while back and it was a problem for a bit but to be honest Affinity Designer on Windows has improved significantly in the last few months where I'm happy for it to do the work I'd have used Sketch for. Free picture recovery software for mac.
The jump between Windows and Mac isn't that big anyway to be honest. How come you're pondering not making a switch until Q4?