System Requirements Serif Affinity Designer 1.7.3 MacOS Mac Pro, iMac, iMac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac Mini Intel 64-bit Core 2 Duo or better (from 2007).
- Why the MacBook Air and Pro with Apple's M1 chip are so fast: an expert explains. Its superb Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are available for Intel-powered Macs and Apple-powered iPads.
- ☛ Get Affinity Designer For Mac - how to get Affinity Designer on Mac. Affinity Designer for MacOS from the lin.
Affinity Designer, Affinity Publisher, and Affinity Photo have all been updated to version 1.9, bringing new tools and features to both the macOS and iPadOS apps.
Affinity Designer, touted as an alternative to Adobe's Illustrator, now has a new contour tool, allowing users to add contours and line offsets to shapes and paths.
Also added to Designer is the ability to place linked images within the document, reducing file size and allowing for easier collaborative working.
Publisher, Affinity's desktop publishing software, has faster IDML importing. Also new is the ability to bundle image and font resources from a project into a folder via the 'Package' feature. This feature allows users to effortlessly transfer resources to another system, simplifying collaboration and print production.
Users can now set PDF's to 'passthrough' in InDesign as well, enabling 100% fidelity upon export. Users also can integrate text and image links into a document from external data sources with the newly added data merge feature.
Affinity's Photoshop rival, Affinity Photo, gains several improvements to its RAW engine, new linked layer functionality, path text, and a new mode to control the stacking of astrography images.
Additionally, Photo sees the ability to add liquify adjustments to images as live, maskable layers, which allows for non-destructive photo editing.
The updates are available, starting on February 4, across all Affinity apps on macOS, Windows, and iPad.
Affinity is still selling all three of its creative suite apps for 50% off as an initiative to support the creative community during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
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At the end of 2020 we launched an exciting update for the macOS versions of our apps, one that would allow users to tap straight into the potential of Apple’s next generation of Macs and, in turn, do more, faster. This is thanks to the update’s full compatibility with Apple’s latest macOS update, Big Sur, and optimisation for M1—Apple’s newly-launched chip, specifically designed for the Mac.
This is great news for our users because the architecture of the M1, particularly having such a high-performance GPU with unified memory with the CPU, is perfect for professional creative applications. The advantages are particularly noticeable when working on documents with thousands of pixel layers, vector objects and text. Edits to pixel layers are best handled on the GPU, while vector and text on the CPU, so when you have unified memory, it allows much faster handling of these complex documents.
Our fully-featured iPad apps already take advantage of very similar architecture on the A-series chips and ever since developing for iPad, we’d always hoped that chips with this architecture would eventually come to Mac—and now they have.
Our developers were lucky enough to receive the DTK from Apple so we could prime all our apps for M1 before launch and get them up and running natively on the new hardware, making Affinity apps the first professional creative applications to offer native M1 support.
With our apps now primed for this transition, Mac customers with M1 can expect a more responsive user experience with respect to painting, pixel editing, filter effects, document rendering and more. It also enables many more elements like adjustment layers and live filters to be maintained before performance suffers—allowing for a more non-destructive workflow, even on the most complex of documents.
To sum it up, M1 makes our apps run faster, smoother and feel more responsive than ever before (we’ve even seen speed increases of over 3x faster running on the new MacBook Air). It’s definitely a big step forward for Mac, and we can’t wait to see how the rest of the Mac range develops in the future.
Affinity Designer Macbook Air 3
If you own the apps already, make sure you download the latest update today for free, otherwise head over to our homepage to learn more about our professional creative software.