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redwasp

16 karma · joined May 4, 2023

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redwasp··on Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
Ugh. I've seen what happens with Canva's acquisitions once already, albeit at a much smaller scale: I used to use a free service for PowerPoint templates called SlidesCarnival[1]. Decent templates, very customizable, and generally significantly better than the PowerPoint defaults.

They also got bought out by Canva, and I've watched the quality drop massively- any new content is almost entirely unusable, often only available on Canva itself, and chock full of design tropes and poorly SEO-optimized content. (Some of them are so bad as to be unintentionally hilarious.) It's a real mess, and it makes me less than optimistic about them buying out Affinity.

To be fair, their model was wildly different from a fully-featured editing suite, and certainly welcomed this kind of change, but they absolutely gutted that site: the only positive is that the original templates are still there, if you search for them. I'm not holding my breath, but I expect the same treatment now. An absolute shame- I don't use a photo editor enough to warrant an Adobe subscription, so I'll probably stay on Affinity V2 until it stops working.

[1]: https://www.slidescarnival.com/

redwasp··on Governor of Amazonas wants to charge Amazon royalties for use of the brand
The Iceland v Iceland Foods debacle was at least a bit more understandable- the country wasn't particularly happy with the trademark, but took the matter to court after the food company "sought in 2016 to prevent various Icelandic producers from using the word ‘Iceland’ to describe their goods."

https://trademarklawyermagazine.com/the-cold-never-bothered-...

redwasp··on Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla
Surprising, since Mozilla's article(https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/article...) does place them dead last, right behind Nissan. Granted, it'll be hard not to buy a car on that list!
redwasp··on How and why we acquired our .com domain
Funny enough, I'm also the owner of firstnamelastname.com: I bought it when I was first in college, and sold it for $300 or so to an actor of the same name when I was entirely broke. For some reason, he let the domain expire, and I bought it again a few years later at the registration price. $5k at this point wouldn't be nearly enough for me to change email addresses again, that's an absolute pain.