Initial Thoughts on Affinity by Canva

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I’ve been an Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher user since sometime before 2019 (the first mention I can find here), and have recommended them to a lot of people as a less expensive but (nearly) equivalent alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign suite of apps. Last year Affinity was acquired by Canva, which did not thrill me (I’m not a fan of Canva, as accessibility has never seemed to be a high priority for them, and remediating PDFs created by Canva users is an ongoing exercise in frustration), but at the time they pledged to uphold Affinity’s pricing and quality. All we could do at that point was wait to see what happened.

A few weeks ago, Affinity closed their forums, opened a Discord server, removed the ability to purchase the current versions of the Affinity suite of apps, and started posting vague “something big is coming” posts to their social media channels and email lists. Not surprisingly, this did not go over well with much of the existing user base, and we’ve had three weeks of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), with a lot of people (including me) expecting that Canva would taking Affinity down the road of enshittification.

Yesterday was the big announcement, and…

The Affinity by Canva startup splash screen.

…as it turns out, it looks to me at first blush that it doesn’t suck. The short version:

  1. Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher have been deprecated, all replaced with a single unified application called Affinity by Canva.
    1. The existing versions of the old Affinity suite (version 2.6.5) will continue to work, so existing users can continue to use those if they don’t want to update. In theory, these will work indefinitely; in practice, that depends on how long Canva keeps the registration servers active and when Apple releases a macOS update that breaks the apps in some way. Hopefully, neither of those things happens for quite some time (and if Canva ever does decide to retire the registration servers, I’d really hope that they’d at least be kind enough to issue a final update for the apps that removes the registration check; I don’t expect it, but it would be the best possible way to formally “end of life” support for these apps).
  2. Affinity by Canva is free.
    1. You do need to sign in with a Canva account. But you had to sign in to Affinity with Serif account, and Canva now owns Serif, so this isn’t exactly a big surprise for me.
  3. The upsell is that if you want to use AI features, you have to pony up for a paid Canva Pro account. Assumedly, they figure there are enough people on the AI bandwagon that this, in combination with Canva’s coffers, will be enough to subsidize the app for all the people who don’t want or need the AI features.
    1. “AI features” is a little vague, but it seems to cover both generative AI and machine learning tools.

    2. Affinity’s new “Machine Learning Models” preferences section has four optional installs: Segmentation (“allows Photo to create precise, detailed pixel selections”), Depth Estimation (“allows Photo to build a depth map from pixel layers or placed images”), Colorization (“used to restore realistic colors from a black and white pixel layer”), and Super Resolution (“allows pixel layers to be scaled up in size without loss of quality”). Of these, Segmentation is the only one that currently is installable without a Canva Pro account; the other three options are locked. The preferences dialog does have a note that “all machine learning operations in Affinity Photo are performed ‘on-device’ — so no data leaves your device at any time”.

    3. The Canva AI Integrations page on the new Affinity site indicates that available AI tools also include generative features such as automatically expanding the edges of an image and text-to-image generation (interestingly, this includes both pixel and vector objects).

    4. In the FAQs at the bottom of the integrations promo page, Canva says that Affinity content is not used to train AI. “In Affinity, your content is stored locally on your device and we don’t have access to it. If you choose to upload or export content to Canva, you remain in control of whether it can be used to train AI features — you can review and update your privacy preferences any time in your Canva settings.”

      1. If you, like me, are not a fan of generative AI, I do recommend checking your Canva account settings and disabling everything you can (I’ve done this myself). The relevant settings are under “Personal Privacy” (I disabled everything) and “AI Personalization”.
    5. I actually feel like this is an acceptable approach. Since I’m no fan of generative AI, I can simply not sign up for a Canva Pro account, disable the “Canva AI” button in Affinity’s top button bar, and not worry about it; people who do want to use it can pay the money to do so. I do wish there was a clearer distinction between generative AI and on-device machine learning tools and that more of the on-device machine learning tools were available without being locked behind the paywall; that said, the one paywalled feature I’d be most likely to occasionally want to use is the Super Resolution upscaling, and I can do that in an external app on the occasional instances where I need it.

So at this point, I’m feeling mostly okay with the changes. There are still some reservations, of course.

I’m not entirely sold on the “single app” approach. Generally, a “one stop shop” approach tends to mean that a program is okay at doing a lot of things instead of being really good at doing one thing, and it would be a shame if this change meant reduced functionality. That said, Affinity has said that this was their original vision, and they’ve long had an early version of this in their existing apps, with top-bar buttons in each app that would switch you into an embedded “light” version of the other apps for specific tasks, so it does feel like a pretty natural evolution.

A lot of this does depend on how much trust you put in Canva. Of course, that goes with any customer/app/developer relationship. I have my skepticism, but I’m also going to recognize that at least right now, Canva does seem to be holding to the promises that they made when they acquired Serif/Affinity.

Time will tell how well Canva actually holds to their promises of continuing to provide a free illustration, design, and publishing app that’s powerful enough to compete with three of Adobe’s major apps. Right now, I’m landing…maybe not on “cautiously optimistic”, but at least somewhere in “cautiously hopeful”.

Finally, one very promising thing I’ve already found. While I haven’t done any in-depth experimenting yet, I did take a peek at the new Typography section, and styles can now define PDF export tags! The selection of available tags to choose from is currently somewhat limited (just P and H1 through H6), but the option is there. I created a quick sample document, chose the Export: PDF (digital – high quality) option, and there is a “Tagged” option that is enabled by default for this export setting (it’s also enabled by default for the PDF (digital – small size) and PDF (for export) options; the PDF (for print), PDF (press ready), PDF (flatten), PDF/X-1a:2003, PDF/X-3:2003, and PDF/X-4 options all default to having the “Tagged” option disabled).

When I exported the PDF (38 KB PDF) and checked it in Acrobat, the good news is that the heading and paragraph tags exist! The less-good news is that paragraphs that go over multiple lines are tagged with one P tag per line, instead of one P tag per paragraph.

So accessible output support is a bit of a mixed bag right now (only a few tags available, imperfect tagging on export), but it’s at least a good improvement over the prior versions. Here’s the current help page on creating accessible PDFs, and hopefully this is a promising sign of more to come.

Weekly Notes: October 20–26, 2025

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  • ♿️ Another quite busy week at work. Tuesday through Thursday mornings were the WAPED fall meeting; on various days this afternoon there were meetings with artists who are working with some of our visually disabled students on some tactile public art for the soon-to-open light rail station near the college, two training sessions on creating screen-reader accessible math equations in documents, and two public information sessions with a representative from the Secretary of State about Washington State’s accessible voting options.

  • Sunday afternoon, we went down to Federal Way to see the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s Snow White. It was cute! It was definitely solidly in the realm of “how close to Disney can we get without getting sued” territory, and it had more endings than Lord of the Rings (the audience was actually getting confused), but it was still an enjoyable performance and made for a good afternoon outing.

Reading

Finished two books this week: Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, and a Star Trek manga.

Listening

I indulged myself with a silly idea I had a few weeks ago, and created a 40-minute mix of mashups based on Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”. Definitely a mix that will either really work for someone or drive them absolutely up the wall.

I also picked up two new albums on Saturday that I’ll start listening to into this coming week:

  • Synthetic. Facts. Eight, the latest in a compilation series from Infacted Recordings.

  • Astral Elevator, the first album from The Tear Garden (Edward Ka-Spel (The Legendary Pink Dots) and cEvin Key (Skinny Puppy)) since 2017. I was first introduced to The Tear Garden (and Legendary Pink Dots, for that matter) in the mid-90s, and I’m glad they’re still working on this project.

Linking

  • Pat Saperstein in Variety: Heaven 17 Plans New Version of ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ Calling Out Trump Instead of Reagan: ‘It’s Not Going to Get Any Less Relevant, Is It?’: “…the band plans to release an updated version of the song, which has become an unofficial anthem of the resistance to Donald Trump. At a recent protest sign-making party in Los Angeles’ Echo Park, it was part of the anti-fascist playlist that got neighborhood activists dancing. A few days later, the fast-paced, incredibly catchy ’80s standard could be heard blasting from speakers at the Downtown Los Angeles No Kings protest.”

  • Lisa Bonos at The Washington Post: Meet the people who dare to say no to artificial intelligence: “Some tech workers told The Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp. Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, turning off Google’s chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones.”

  • Peter Wolinski at Tom’s Guide: How to disable Copilot in Windows 11: “Disabling Copilot in Windows 11 is a straightforward process, and this guide will walk you through the steps to do so.”

  • Mauro Huculak at Pureinfotech: 4 Quick ways to permanently disable Windows Recall on Windows 11: “Recall is designed to function as a photographic memory, powered by a local AI model, making it easier to locate past activities, including documents, websites, messages, images, and apps. […] Recall automatically takes snapshots of your screen at regular intervals (around every five seconds), which can capture sensitive information, such as private conversations, financial details, or personal images.”

  • Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Knowledge is Worth Your Time: “What matters in your courses, even in many cases within your major, isn’t the topic. You’ll probably forget most of what you learn, especially if you don’t end up using it repeatedly in future. What you will always have, though, is the mind that taking the courses made.”

  • Anil Dash: ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web: “OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let’s talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.”

  • Margherita Bassi at Smithsonian Magazine: See This Year’s Hilarious Finalists From the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards, From Gossiping Leopards to Breakdancing Foxes: “Founded in 2015 by two professional photographers, the awards merge skillful wildlife photography with the “positive power” of humor to promote wildlife and habitat conservation, per a statement. The competition is free and open to novices, amateurs and professionals.”

  • Ella Glover at The Guardian: ‘I get to do whatever I want in the moment’: why more people are going to gigs, festivals and clubs alone: “Some research suggests that the average age of festivalgoers is increasing, and older people are still going out frequently, which may account for the increased number of people attending solo….”

Star Trek: The Manga Volume 1: Shinsei/Shinsei edited by Luis Reyes

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Book 57 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

An anthology of six short pieces; five manga-style comics and one short story. Seeing TOS-era Trek through the eyes of manga artists is amusing, and all the stories were fine for Trek in this medium (though the “twist ending” of the first story was pretty clearly visible quite early on). I think this came from the Norwescon Little Free Library table a couple years back, as I’d had no idea this kind of thing existed. My favorite stories were Chris Dows’ “Side Effects” (even with the predictable ending) and Rob Tokar’s “Orphans” (the Enterprise vs. giant mecha!).

Me holding Star Trek: The Manga Vol. 1

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

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Book 56 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I backed the special Kickstarter re-release edition of this on a bit of a whim, figuring that it was worth supporting a local author whom I’d met at Norwescon. I also knew that it was a bit of a risk for me: I never got into role-playing games, and the last time I read a book that I described as “like watching someone else play a game“, I didn’t say that in a complimentary way (Dafydd Ab Hugh’s Doom: Knee-Deep in the Dead). Thankfully, Dinniman is much better at this sort of thing than Ab Hugh was, and I was entertained throughout. Carl isn’t too much of an asshole, Donut is just enough of an asshole (she is a cat, after all), and the adventure is a good balance of dungeon crawl and slowly exploring the wider world. Honestly, I kind of expected that this would be a one-off thing, but I was amused enough that I’ll continue backing the Kickstarter editions to collect a full set.

Me holding Dungeon Cralwer Carl.

Difficult Listening Hour 2025.10.20: I Have Absolutely Had Enough

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One of those goofball ideas that most people will either really like or really hate, with very little in-between: Stringing together every mashup in my collection that’s based on Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”. 40 minutes of one Depeche Mode song mashed up with a bunch of others! Enjoy. Or don’t. Either way, I scratched an itch. ;)

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Weekly Notes: October 13–19, 2025

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  • ♿️ The big thing at work this week was Friday’s annual professional development day; I was serving on the PDD committee, and presented for one of the sessions. The first time I did a PDD accessibility presentation I had two attendees; this year I had over 60, so I’d say that’s a success! If you’d like, you can head on over to YouTube to see me ramble on for a bit over an hour with an introduction to viewing, checking, and editing accessibility tags in PDFs.

  • 🇺🇸 Saturday we took the light rail into Seattle to be part of No Kings 2.0 protest. Reports say that Seattle had around 90,000 participants and that there were as many as 8 million countrywide, making this the second-largest protest in U.S. history (after the 1970 Earth Day protest, which drew 20 million). I brought my camera; my photos from the protest are on Flickr.

  • 🎭 Sunday we went back into the city to see the Seattle Opera’s The Pirates of Penzance. The production was great, and we both really enjoyed getting to see it; I hadn’t seen a performance of Penzance in decades, and it was my wife’s first time seeing a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta on stage. Great way to wrap up a weekend.

📸 Photos

A low-angle shot of a shallow pond on a sunny fall day.
I wrapped up professional development day on Friday with a walk around the pond in the wooded area on campus.
The program for The Pirates of Penzance, held up with the audience and stage in the background.
It is, it is, a glorious thing, to be a pirate king!

📚 Reading

I read the latest Star Trek: Strange New Worlds novel, David Mack’s Ring of Fire.

🎧 Listening

For some time now I’ve been collecting the “Matrix Downloaded” compilations from the Alfa Matrix label. This week I got notification that issue twelve was out, which I realized meant I’d missed the release of issue eleven, so both of those have just been added to my collection. Between professional development day and the weekend’s activities, I haven’t really dug into them yet, but they’re generally pretty solid compilations.

🔗 Linking

Fortnightly Notes: September 29–October 12, 2025

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  • ⌚️ “Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so.” — Ford Prefect, in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I meant to do this last week, but somehow it just didn’t happen. So here we are!

  • 🚀 Last weekend was the October planning meeting for Norwescon; this time held virtually over Zoom. I have a new person on the website team, and we were able to make some good progress on getting them up and running, and they’ve already started jumping in and making some page updates, so things are looking good there.

  • 🕺🏻 I also got to go out to the Mercury for Caturday (or, well, since this was October’s, it was Baturday). Saw a few people, got some dancing in, and had a good night out.

  • 🚨 This week, we had our first run-in with a jury duty scam call. Nothing came of it other than some stress and wasted time, but it wasn’t a fun thing to deal with. If someone calls or leaves you a voice mail saying that you’ve missed jury duty and must immediately pay a fine or be arrested, just hang up and report the call to the police.

📸 Photos

White clouds mostly cover a blue sky above a grid of black horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines made by the girders of an electrical tower.
Standing directly under an electrical line tower during last weekend’s morning walk.
A wide shot of a walking path strewn with fall leaves, with a stone wall on the right side and green trees on either side.
Another shot from last week’s walk; a scenic spot at the top of a hill.
A hawk sits on a branch of a tree under green leaves and a blue sky.
During a walk around the pond on the Highline campus during lunch, I caught the movement of a bird landing in a tree. At first I figured it was one of the many crows, but then saw that it was a hawk. Just managed to get a picture before it flew off again.
Wide shot of three mushrooms on the forest floor, with rounded orange caps with raised white spots.
This weekend’s walk was a good one for mushroom spotting; apparently the recent rains brought them out. These were all over the place.
Pale mushrooms kind of resembling flattened cauliflower grow out of a moss-covered tree stump on a forest floor.
Another kind of mushroom we spotted.

📝 Writing

I was a little more talkative this week, with a rant about Apple’s Music app breaking under Tahoe and posting my current ranking of the Star Trek films.

📚 Reading

Finished Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls, the second book of her World of the Five Gods series. This was also my 64th Hugo Best Novel award winner, putting me 78% of the way through reading them all.

🎧 Listening

After hearing Blackbook’s “I Dance Alone” at the Mercury last Saturday and realizing I had another couple songs by them already in my collection that I’d picked up on samplers and enjoyed (“Love is a Crime” and “You Are Strange”), I went ahead and picked up their albums Confessions of the Innocent and Radio Strange. Really enjoying them both, and lots of these will be ending up in my regular rotation.

🔗 Linking

  • Stephanie Booth: Rebooting the Blogosphere, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3: “What this is all about is figuring out how blogging can learn from what made “The Socials” (which became the big capitalist social networks we all know) so successful, to the point that many die-hard bloggers (myself included) got sucked up in the socials and either completely abandoned their blog, or left it on life-support. I believe that understanding this can help us draft a vision for how things in the “open social web” (I’ll keep calling it that for the time being) can work, now or in the near future, to give us the best of both blogging and the socials, without requiring that we sell our souls or leave our content hostage to big corporations.”

  • Andrew Villeneuve at The Cascadia Advocate: Are you a PNW voter who usually returns your ballot via U.S. Mail? Switch to a drop box to ensure it counts this year!: “Do not return your ballot through the United States Postal Service — there’s a real risk it won’t receive a timely postmark.”

  • Dahlia Bazzaz at the Seattle Times: UW students chase disrupter out of class: “A young man barged into a 400-person human sexuality lecture at the University of Washington on Wednesday, making what appeared to be Nazi salutes and hurling insults at the class. ¶ But it wasn’t security personnel who escorted him out of the Kane Hall classroom. It was the students and their professor.”

  • Seattle Indivisible: Seattle No Kings- Oct 18: The main page for next weekend’s No Kings protest rally at the Seattle Center.

  • Glenn Fleishman at Six Colors: Navigate your Mac without a mouse: “Ok, hotshot, here’s a test. You’ve got a Mac with a keyboard. There’s no USB mouse to hand within a 500-mile radius. You have an unpaired Bluetooth mouse. Whatcha gonna do, punk? You got any bright ideas?”

  • Mike Masnick at TechDirt: The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment: “The problem isn’t just burying important quotes—it’s the widespread adoption of “view from nowhere” reporting that treats even the most basic facts as matters of debate.”

  • Alice Strangman & Liza Groen Trombi at Locus: Seattle Worldcon 2025: Locus‘s writeup of the Seattle Worldcon. After putting about a year and a half into this (and with friends who have been working on it for a decade), it’s nice to see this writeup.

  • Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing: “This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. It is meant to act as a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content on Wikipedia.” Written for Wikipedia, but is a good list of things to look for.

  • Rachel Saslow at Willamette Week: An Interview With the Portland Chicken: “When they try to describe this situation as “war-torn,” it becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying [Secretary] Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.”

  • Decca Muldowney and Alex Hanna: Sora 2 Serves up More Slop: “The potential for misinformation and the ability to “flood the zone” with videos that throw doubt onto the authenticity of online content is evident. Moreover, shitty video-generation apps like Sora 2 don’t “democratize” art, they degrade human creativity itself.”

  • Christian Kriticos at the BBC: A digital dark age? The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks: “At first, the durable plastic of floppy disks, popular from the 1970s to the 1990s, may seem more secure than fragile manuscripts. Paper rots, ink fades and runs. Synthetic materials can last much longer – that is, after all, why plastic pollution is such a concern. But the digital information saved inside these rigid cassettes is more vulnerable than you might think.”

Ranking the Star Trek Films (Again)

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An update to my last attempt at doing this back in 2009. I originally posted this to Mastodon back in April after watching Star Trek: Section 31, and after realizing I hadn’t cross-posted it here, am doing that now. Also somewhat prompted by a friend sending me this ranking from Den of Geek, which is close, but not identical, to mine; I do broadly agree with their summaries of the various films.

I gave it some thought, and while the exact placement of any of these might vary slightly depending on time/mood/etc., I think this is a pretty good stab at my personal Star Trek film ranking, best/favorite to worst/least favorite:

  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
  • Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
  • Star Trek: First Contact
  • Star Trek: The Motion Picture
  • Galaxy Quest
  • Star Trek (2009)
  • Star Trek Beyond
  • Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
  • Star Trek: Generations
  • Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
  • Star Trek: Section 31
  • Star Trek: Insurrection
  • Star Trek: Nemesis
  • Star Trek Into Darkness

A few more details:

The first three (TWoK, TVH, TUC) are essentially a three-way tie for first. At any given point, the order could be shuffled around and would probably be acceptable.

TMP remains in that place whether it’s the theatrical, TV extended, or directors cut, but of the three, the director’s cut is definitively the best.

Some purists might be surprised at the two Kelvinverse films ranking that high, but for all the faults, the casting was so good at embodying the characters without slavishly copying or parodying (intentionally or not) the original actors, and I think both films are a lot of fun.

Christopher Lloyd’s Kruge almost pushes TSfS higher, but…not quite. But it does mark the dividing line between “films I can put on at just about any time and enjoy” and “films I’ll watch when there’s a reason to” (chronological rewatch, someone else wants to watch one, etc.).

S31 is barely Star Trek. It’s a generic sci-fi spy film that someone spritzed with synthehol and Starfleet emblems; it ranks as high as it does because it’s an acceptable generic sci-fi spy film, entirely suitable for having on in the background and occasionally paying attention to. Michelle Yeoh (and Georgeau) deserved better.

Into Darkness…I just have so many issues with it. I will be quite unpleasantly surprised if they ever make a Trek film that knocks it out of the bottom spot on this list.