problem with affinity photo app after updating to sonoma14.0

Here's what I see from Affinity's Help in Sonoma. FWIW, a search usually ends up with "no results" under Affinity Photo Help, however, occasionally depending on the search term, something will show as in the screen shot. Although it has nothing to do with the search term.

I see what you are saying. I had to check the apps in Monterey to see what they did before. The search while in Sonoma does not work as it did. However, it's possible Affinity has not implemented the search function correctly for Sonoma despite their proclamation it's Apple's issue.

I think all that can happen is Affinity and Apple will have to work on the issue. Since Affinity claims it's Apple's problem, they should contact Apple and let them know.

llfox wrote:

Actually Ive had some similar types of issues with long-time 3rd party apps like VLC player and my Wacom tablet(~6 months old), a few other apps too.

I'm not sure how VLC is related since its help window only has links to the online help pages and no "Search" field. But, you're welcome.

dialabrain wrote:

I had to check the apps in Monterey to see what they did before. The search while in Sonoma does not work as it did. However, it's possible Affinity has not implemented the search function correctly for Sonoma despite their proclamation it's Apple's issue.

I would blame both Apple and Affinity. Affinity is relatively new in the Mac world. They may not fully realize how Apple works.

Here's the story. Apple broke its built-in help system many years ago. The last time it was fully functional was 2017. The only thing about this question that is surprising is that Affinity was actually still trying not use it. I guess they learned a lesson.

Hopefully Affinity will realize that and implement their own help system. I wrote my own drop-in replacement back in the day. But it is still a help system, the only people who care less than developers are users. 😄

etresoft wrote:

I would blame both Apple and Affinity. Affinity is relatively new in the Mac world. They may not fully realize how Apple works.

You can blame whoever you like. No skin off my teeth. 😎

In any case, you can search Affinity's help window in Monterey, not in Sonoma. I don't have Ventura installed on anything so don't know if it worked there or not.

dialabrain wrote:

In any case, you can search Affinity's help window in Monterey, not in Sonoma. I don't have Ventura installed on anything so don't know if it worked there or not.

There is one thing you can try. Go through your 3rd party apps. Focus on the ones that work best and are best supported. Try their help feature. See which ones actually use Apple's help.

The standard practice these days it to just dump the user to the web site, hopefully to an online help page. Some apps have their own, custom-designed integrated help. I could only find two 3rd party apps that attempted to use Apple's help. One just displayed an error page.

BBEdit actually worked. I'll have to test the search in Sonoma to see what it does. But even in Monterey, it's easy to see why no developer would want to use Apple's help, if for no other reason than the search feature. Search BBEdit's help for something a couple of times. If you pick the right search terms, you'll see what I mean. This is Apple's help system. So when you search, it searches the entire help system. So you can easily construct a search that is going to return results from some other app. That's a total mission failure. Your app should never suggest to the user to run some other app instead.

In EtreCheck, I do something sneaky. Of course, I have my own help system. It looks and works very similar to Apple's. I've improved upon Apple's system. I support dark mode. My anchors work. I can adjust the font size. And my search only searches EtreCheck. But it is all run from a genuine Apple help bundle. That way, if someone is using some other app that uses Apple's help and they search for something, they might get results from EtreCheck. Alas, Apple's help being what it is, few people are every going to discover that.

dialabrain wrote:

At least "All Other Help" works from Affinity's help window on Sonoma.

Wait a minute. Are you actually saying that the only part of search that still works is the one where it directs users to other apps?

dialabrain wrote:

Here's what I see from Affinity's Help in Sonoma. FWIW, a search usually ends up with "no results" under Affinity Photo Help, however, occasionally depending on the search term, something will show as in the screen shot. Although it has nothing to do with the search term.

I checked BBEdit on Sonoma and its help doesn't work properly. However, all Apple apps seems to work fine. I had Skim installed on Sonoma to check EPS support. Skim uses Apple help and it searches correctly. Hard to say what the problem is. At least dark mode finally seems to work in Ventura. But the "hiutil" tool still fails. It can create help index files, but it can't read them. I still have the old 10.13 version for verification. Gotta love developing for the Mac.

At the risk of being behind on this general topic question ... I tried to install Sonoma a few months ago now on my Mac mini M1 and ran into many problems trying to run Affinity suit. So here I am again, now that Sonoma is at 14.2.1, can I expect Affinity (1.0) suite to run properly if I go ahead an upgrade to Sonoma (from Ventura 13.6) ?

Thanks, Gary

Just to add, you can send Apple feedback if you like.

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Maybe I'm missing something…