"We're still developing our Windows products, they aren't going away," Hewson says. This approach would not only target Adobe customers disillusioned with the company's Creative Cloud subscription model, but also prevent the new software from cannibalising Serif's existing Windows products. "Our Windows products are very much used by hobbyists rather than creative agencies or professionals," Hewson says, so Affinity Designer was built from the ground up with "an unashamedly pro focus". According to Serif, 60-70% of all creative professionals use a Mac, and in Hewson's eyes, "there's no-one out there producing products that can credibly compete with Adobe."
Considering Serif's entire development team is made up of around thirty staff, it was a huge undertaking to move a third of the team away from Windows and over to Mac OS X, but one that was necessary in order to break into the professional market. The project goes back about four or five years, with a dedicated team of 10 developers working simultaneously on three projects: the Affinity Designer vector graphics editor, Affinity Photo image editor and Affinity Publisher page layout tool. "The team basically had to start from scratch for OS X." "It would have been very difficult to port our Windows products to Mac, as they are very reliant on Windows libraries and other elements of the operating system," Hewson explained. All the bug reports are relatively minor too." An impressive debut app for a company with no prior experience coding for OS X - Affinity isn't merely a port of Serif's DrawPlus for Windows.
"We've seen over 4,000 sign ups in the first day of release and have had very few reported crash issues. "Reaction to the beta has been overwhelmingly positive," Ashley Hewson, Serif's managing director, told us. Following the reveal of Affinity Designer for Mac OS X earlier this week, we spoke to Serif to find out why it switched from making software just for Microsoft Windows, whether its vector graphics package has what it takes to challenge the might of Adobe's Illustrator, and what customers have to look forward to in the near future.
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