Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Huh? Weird stuff, desktop background and unlock screen?


Recommended Posts

I was working on a site map for my new workspace, suddenly Designer started doing weird stuff.

 

I had been looking at things in the program's UI settings because I had this sort of grid of fine lines, close together running at 45degrees on my Designer background. They were behind any object, including the background layer. Sort of like the transparency on photo, but not quite. That grid suddenly disappeared when I adjusted the UI Gamma. Why would that disappear when I adjust that?

 

Next I couldn't select objects with the move tool, objects turned purple and i couldn't get them to "unpurple" anymore... I closed the app and found out the image I had been working on was suddenly on my OSX desktop background. I went to lunch, got back and found out it was on the unlock screen as well! I sure didn't put it there! Wouldn't know how to. Can the desktop even show .afdesign files? Apparently it can. Even weirder, it wasn't all of the file, several layers were missing.

 

 

I have to say, coming from Windows and CorelDraw I have a crapload of stuff to adjust to. Mostly that OSX just DOESN'T TELL ME ANYTHING! I click on stuff and NOTHING HAPPENS. Or stuff happens and I don't understand why? Windows always used to tell me what it's doing or if stuff goes wrong somewhere.

I was hoping moving to Mac would be  a step up. But I have been looking at PC laptops again lately. Surface Pro 4 is looking extremely good, right now!

 

Sorry about that. I had to vent a bit.

 

BTW, there was a lot about that early 90ies CorelDraw that Affinity could take pointers from. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff

Hi DutchDude,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

You're describing quite a few different issues here. I'm not sure i've understood all but will try to help wherever i can.

 

The lines running at 45 degrees:

I'm not sure what may be happening here. Any chance you can take a screenshot of the program window so we can see what's going on?

To take a screenshot of an application window on OS X, press ⇧ (shift) + ⌘ (cmd) + 4, then Space and place the camera icon over the window you want to capture, then click. The screenshot will be placed on your desktop. To upload/attach it to the forum follow the steps on this clip.

 

Regarding the purple lines around the objects:

Those purple lines serve to identify objects that are snapping candidates. To disable the purple outline go to menu View ▸ Snapping Manager... and uncheck Show snapping candidates almost on top.

To learn more about snapping candidates check this video tutorial - Snapping: Object Creation

 

Regarding desktop background:

I'm not sure how you have changed it accidentally but if you right-click on an empty area of the desktop and select Change Desktop Background... you should be able to replace the original from the Apple section, Desktop Pictures folder.

 

It's normal to experience a few issues when changing from one OS that you were already familiar with to a new one. Things will become more easier and will make more sense as you get used to it.

Meanwhile i would try to take a look at some video tutorials or the Apple support site to learn more about OS X.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

+1 CorelDRAW aspects

There are still a lot of things I miss from CD, having switched to Mac.  SO thankful to have AD as it is so much better than any other affordable vector app for OS X.  But there are still a few things that leave me "looking over the fence"

So waiting patiently.  (ok, maybe not always patiently)    Looking forward to the new beta release, hopefully soon.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

DutchDude

 

Stop talking nonsense,

If you want to switch back to windows crap go ahead and do it but stop blaming a computer, a mac in this case, for what might be an issue with the program you are running.

2017 27” iMac 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 • Radeon Pr 580 8GB • 64GB • Ventura 13.6.4.

iPad Pro (10.5-inch) • 256GB • Version 16.4

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dutch,

 

regarding your OS X troubles: switching to OS X may seem difficult in the begining but you WILL find out the system is much more user friendly than it may look initially. Some things work slightly differently here but if you leave your Windows habits aside, you will find out that OS X is more intuitive than Win in most cases. At least this was how I felt a few years ago when switching to OS X after MANY years with Windows... 

 

Anyway: the best thing to do when you seem to be unable to achieve something in OS X: Just google it. There's a metric ton of guides and how-tos these days and they usually save you a lot of frustration compared to a figure-it-out-myslef approach...

 

Cheers buddy!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi DutchDude,

 

Sorry, I shouldn't have come down on you and your troubles so heavily.

Please accept my apology.

 

PS: Hope you find a way to negotiate successfuly your current problems and eventually come to appreciate the mac platform.

2017 27” iMac 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 • Radeon Pr 580 8GB • 64GB • Ventura 13.6.4.

iPad Pro (10.5-inch) • 256GB • Version 16.4

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi DutchDude,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

You're describing quite a few different issues here. I'm not sure i've understood all but will try to help wherever i can.

 

The lines running at 45 degrees:

I'm not sure what may be happening here. Any chance you can take a screenshot of the program window so we can see what's going on?

To take a screenshot of an application window on OS X, press ⇧ (shift) + ⌘ (cmd) + 4, then Space and place the camera icon over the window you want to capture, then click. The screenshot will be placed on your desktop. To upload/attach it to the forum follow the steps on this clip.

 

Regarding the purple lines around the objects:

Those purple lines serve to identify objects that are snapping candidates. To disable the purple outline go to menu View ▸ Snapping Manager... and uncheck Show snapping candidates almost on top.

To learn more about snapping candidates check this video tutorial - Snapping: Object Creation

 

Regarding desktop background:

I'm not sure how you have changed it accidentally but if you right-click on an empty area of the desktop and select Change Desktop Background... you should be able to replace the original from the Apple section, Desktop Pictures folder.

 

It's normal to experience a few issues when changing from one OS that you were already familiar with to a new one. Things will become more easier and will make more sense as you get used to it.

Meanwhile i would try to take a look at some video tutorials or the Apple support site to learn more about OS X.

I'm having trouble uploading the image, Error 500. The image is less than 1 Mb. Here is a dropbox link:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rd34gexkn388u9x/Diagonal%20Background.jpg?dl=0

 

But... I just put on my glasses and it appears they are not lines, but it's a light grey/white checkerboard pattern actually very similar to a photo editor transparent background, just finer. Smaller squares. I now remember seeing that before, just forgot about it.

Somewhere I can turn that off?

 

BTW,

The squares I drew in the diagram are exactly that. Squares. I couldn't find how to show the grid and even more important: adjust the scale. So I made my own grid. This does mean I have to divide all measurements by 40 to get the size correct in the file. That's a bit of a drag.

 

About changing the desktop background, I really didn't do all that you mentioned. I was just working on that image. I think something happened while saving. Could I just have saved that somewhere where it got mixed in with the images that are used for the desktop background? I have set the default Apple images on an hour rotation. But I think it was set to only the one image when I did right-click the background.

 

I understand the purple outlines. It was just weird that they were irregular. And that I was having trouble selecting other objects.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff

Hi DutchDude,

Thanks for the image. That's because the background is set to Transparent. To turn it white again go to File ▸ Document Setup..., Colour tab and uncheck Transparent background.

 

To display the grid go to menu View ▸ Show Grid. To configure it go to menu View ▸ Grid and Axis Manager..., uncheck Use Automatic Grid and set the grid as you want in the section below.

 

You may have saved the image to the Pictures folder, which can be directly accessed from the Desktop & Screensaver Preferences panel on the list on the left under the Folders section. In any case if you already changed it again to Apple, Desktop Pictures folder then everything is working correctly now i suppose.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks! It's been bothering me for months.

 

If I ever get it to change the desktop again I'll let you know.

 

 

In my OP there's a bit of frustration. Feel free to log out any time.

I've gone all Apple with this MBP in April '15, an iPhone last Christmas. I have had the MBP for over a year now, but still something like getting the photo's off my phone into my external harddisc is a quest of epic proportions. Because of Apple's ludicrous premium for internal memory I got the 256Gb MBP, which isn't even the smallest, but if I kept all my photo's and video's on there it would be half the internal disc.

 

With Android/Win it was easy. Hook the Android up, it appears as an external drive in Win Explorer. Navigate to the phone's DCIM folder and drag to the external drive (ED). Done. Delete on the phone.

 

On Mac/iPhone... I'm a cheapskate (... well, a bit....). Anyway, I don't have the enlarged iCloud.

So...

Hook it up to the MBP, iTunes opens, Photo's app opens and wants to import everything. There's loads on there that I've imported before. What does it do? Will it import them again? It doesn't say so. It doesn't say it doesn't either. Better let it import them then I guess.

Then how do I get them into the ED? I don't know. Where does the photo's app store them? Click "show info" on a photo, it tells me what the photo was taken with, what the aperture was, when it was taken, even a nice map view of where it was taken. But not where on the disc I can find the file! Can't find them in finder, they're not in the pictures folder. Oh, I can drag them from Photo's into the Finder window. Now they're on both the phone, the MBP and the ED. Phew.

Now to get them off my phone and MBP. Photo's app. on phone shows 170 photo's and videos. Click edit. Select. No option for "select all". I'm going to have to select every photo separately and delete it. Go up one level to albums, apparently I was in Camera Roll, I now have four choices, one of them is My Photo Stream and that has 220+ files. ? Why is that more than camera roll? in My photo stream, I can select all. Press Delete. "These photo's will also be deleted from Photo Stream on all your devices". CRAP. Do I want that? I don't know! They're safe on my ED so I guess so. Why is my Photo Stream on my MBP 1079 files and on the phone 225? They're different. OK. So it's not a syncing thing. Then what is it for? 

I could go on and on. 

I found a way on google to directly copy the photo's from the iPhone to the ED. But. I had to Google it. It was not obvious. I even searched for something like this. I had to Google it, someone had to have a tut somewhere for it, else I'd never found it.

 

 

Whatever was wrong with the old way where you had Norton Commander or something like that (Windows Explorer). There would be folders on your computer and a file was in one place and if you moved it it would be in another? A program could address that file in that place and leave it there. Nicely singular and coherent. Nowadays with Apple there are all these virtual places and different ways to approach the file it is confusing to me. The iPad is even worse with no file system app whatsoever. I have three apps on mine that can read pdfs. Suppose I open a pdf from an email in one of them. I want to use another and open the same pdf there, is it now on two places in the iPad or do they both reference the same place? What happens when I delete it in one. is it gone in the other?

With a 16Gb iPadd space is severely limited. I didn't know that when I bought it, couldn't afford the upgrade to a 64 anyway. Now the only way to upgrade an iPad is to sell it and buy a bigger one. Don't start me on that in a day when a 64Gb SD card costs $20,-

 

 

 

Bottom line. It's not as clear cut and obvious as it seems. The "Just trust Apple"-gene is very dormant within me.

 

I miss some things. Foxit PDF reader was wildly more functional on Win than on the Mac. I had this wonderful FREE Business Calendar app on Android (do not confuse with the one on iPhone, not the same maker) that had all this functionality like rotate to landscape and or portrait view, you could zoom in and out by pinching so I could actually read the appointments and it could set appointments more than a year in advance and scroll back further than 4 months... Loved the home screens on Android with the weather widgets and direct links to phone numbers and such. 

 

Why did I go to Apple anyway, knowing beforehand this would happen? Lots of other reasons. Curiosity. Security. Connectivity with all the other family that are squarely in the Apple camp and can't be budged. Upgrade policy on Android sucks. I figured I'd get used to it. Takes me more than I hoped.

 

Thank you for this free therapy session.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And I really miss the beeps when a USB thingy was succesfully assimilated into the fold... Mac just does... Nothing. Don't even know if it works. Is there a beep setting somewhere I can't find?

 

I'll go google it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

An OS X application which is named "Digitale Bilder" in German OS X which would be something like digital media/ picture on an English OS X you can just drag the pictures from your iPhone to a hard drive and even check a box to automatically delete them afterwards.

 

Hope that helps

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks! I found that this week. It is called Image Capture in English.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4177106?tstart=0

 

My problem is that I had to Google for it. It's not that obvious and therefore not as easy as the fans always claim it is. And I've been Googling lots of stuff this year. This is just a small example. There's a bit of disillusion from the hype.

 

I will shut up about it. It's been tedious enough already. Thanks for all the help!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, I think it is better, to stop the discussion at this point! :)

Just one example  (… and I could give you more and more), why it seems to be useless to go on here You write: "I really miss the beeps when a USB thingy was succesfully assimilated into the fold... Mac just does... Nothing."

A "USB thingy" - what is that? Do you mean an USB memory stick? If yes, why don’t you simply tell us?

And further on? There should be something "succesfully assimilated" - What the hell is that?

• Can’t you "see" the USB stick on your machine? We could easily help, if this should be the case. You only have to tell us …

• Or can’t you recognize, when something is copied from the stick to your machine? There are at least 2 visual and one acoustic indicators for this (Alert box with progress bar, it the process lasts longer then some milliseconds, or a dimmed file icon with a small progress bar at the "target" place. Furthermore, there is a very clear acoustic signal, when the process is done.) Is this not enough? But I forgot: You want a beep. The OS X sound is no "beep". You won’t find any "beeps" in OS X. The sounds – thanks god – are a litte bit more decent.

Another example is, what you tell about Apple Photos: It is an application, and you simply should read the help files supplied in the  "Help" menu. If you are not willing to learn or get acquainted to a new computer, an operating system or an application, I would very seriously suggest: Go back to Windows, what you obviously understand. With your attitude of mind you will never get lucky with the Mac and ist OS. (Short information: When you next time use an USB stick and Apple Photos opens, just don’t get angry but look to the upper right corner of the application window. There you will find an interesting option!) :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dang. I wasn't going to go on about this. I'm sorry my wording was hard to follow. I thought it wouldn't be a problem to add some levity.

 

With any USB "thing", be it a scanner, a keyboard, a memory stick, or whatever else you plug into a windows computers USB port, the PC will make a sound not entirely unlike the OSX startup sound. It means it detected the "thingy" and is doing stuff to make it work. To me that is reassuring. The Mac doesn't display any signal whether auditory or visual that anything has changed.

 

I own a couple of devices that are made by small companies that don't have much resources for driver development. Especially the Mac drivers have been problematic. I like knowing things are happening.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Weird! If you plug in those devices, they work (if they are supported, of course), and that’s it.

When my scanner is plugged in, I open my scan software and – tataaa – I scan.

When my keyboard is plugged in, I start typing. and don’t need any "beep" saying "Hello, here I am! I am your keyboard, and if you wish, you can put your fingers onto my keys and press them down!".

If my memory stick is plugged in, I see it, why should there be a "beep"?

Wer are not at a funfair, we’re on a Mac!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 years later...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.