Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher 2.5

Serif has updated Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher to version 2.5 with support for variable fonts that generally let you adjust the width and weight axes and possibly italic, optical size, and slant as well. All three apps now enable you to add QR codes using the new QR Code Tool on the shape tools flyout, set any of your grid settings as the default for new documents, and convert the typography dialog from a pop-up into a panel so it can dock more easily. Affinity Designer brings a new Stroke Width Tool that gives you an in-document way of editing the pressure profile of any curve and improves the Pencil Tool for smoother results. The updates also address a bug that caused PSD files to fail to load and cause high RAM usage, resolve an issue that caused strokes with a pressure profile to be expanded with the wrong width, and rectify an error when exporting a PDF with file hyperlinks. (Affinity Designer, $69.99 new; Affinity Photo, $69.99; Affinity Publisher, $69.99; all three are available separately or together for $164.99 from Serif and are also available individually from the Mac App Store; free updates, various sizes, release notes, macOS 10.15+)