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Canva’s Free Affinity App Takes on Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps—Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign—are best-in-class, and for many people, they’re essential. But if you’re paying $70 per month for a Creative Cloud subscription even though you don’t need the full power of Adobe’s apps, consider Canva’s new Affinity app, available for free for macOS and Windows, with iPadOS coming soon. The extremely capable Affinity combines all the features of the previous Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher apps (which Canva acquired from Serif in 2024). The app can be activated with a free Canva account, but optional AI features require a paid Canva subscription that costs $15 per month or $120 per year. We don’t know if Affinity can replace Creative Cloud for you, but as a free app, it’s worth checking out to see if it meets your needs.
(Featured image by Canva)
Social Media: Could you cut your design costs? Canva’s new Affinity app for macOS and Windows is free but offers features comparable to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Try it and see if it’s enough to replace Creative Cloud.
Try Blip for Fast Transfers of Any Size Between Platforms
For file transfers, Apple users routinely rely on tools like AirDrop, Messages, email, cloud services, and public sharing websites, but these solutions can fall short when dealing with very large files, sharing across platforms, or confidential data. For such scenarios, Blip offers a reliable solution that works across Macs, iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Windows, and Linux machines. It transfers files of any size directly between devices, with no intermediate servers, encrypting its traffic for security. It handles uncompressed folders, offers high transfer speeds, and automatically resumes interrupted transfers—particularly valuable features when working with large media files or project folders. Blip is free for personal use or $25 per month for commercial use, making it easy to determine if it will be helpful for your business.
(Featured image by iStock.com/Makhbubakhon Ismatova)
Social Media: Looking for a better way to transfer large files across devices and platforms? Blip offers secure, direct file transfers between Apple devices and other platforms, with no size limits and automatic resumption of interrupted transfers.
The Best Characters to Use When Naming Files and Folders
Back in the early 1980s, DOS filenames couldn’t be more than 8 characters long with a period and a 3-character extension. That was limiting, so when Apple developed the Mac operating system in 1984, it allowed longer names and eliminated the need for an extension, although Mac OS X’s Unix roots meant a return of the filename extension in 2001. Since then, filename restrictions have loosened to the point where it’s easy to think that they no longer exist.
If only that were true! In some ways, the situation has become even cloudier, thanks to additional limitations from file-sharing services like Dropbox, OneDrive, and Box. (Google Drive’s native Web interface reportedly has no naming limitations, but files whose names contain Windows or macOS forbidden characters may not sync via Google Drive’s desktop software.) Plus, people tend to move files between operating systems more than ever before—if you’re sending a file from your Mac to a Windows user through Dropbox, you need to make sure that all three can deal with the filename.
At least length isn’t something that you generally have to think about these days, since both macOS and Windows—and the cloud services—accept filenames up to 255 characters in length. Technically speaking, Windows limits directory paths (the enclosing folder names along with the filename) to 255 characters, but even still, that shouldn’t be difficult to avoid.
What could go wrong if you run afoul of a naming restriction? macOS and Windows may simply not let you type the character—for example, you can’t put a colon in a Mac filename. Putting a period at the start of a Mac or Unix filename will hide the file. Cloud sharing services might rename the file, or you might encounter syncing issues where files don’t appear where they should. Certain characters can also cause trouble when files are used at the command line.
Here are the characters to avoid and the operating systems and services that prohibit them:
- : (colon): macOS, Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
- . (period): macOS (at the start of a name), Dropbox
- / (forward slash): macOS, Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
- (backslash): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
- < (less than): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
- > (greater than): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
- ” (double quote): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
- | (vertical bar or pipe): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
- ? (question mark): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
- * (asterisk): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
- ^ (caret): Windows (using FAT-formatted drives)
In addition, avoid using special characters like the © (copyright) symbol or emoji 🤷🏽♂️ in filenames. They might work locally, but all bets are off if you share the files in any way.
A few other recommendations:
- Avoid unusual punctuation; in particular, note that OneDrive renames filenames containing:
- , (comma) to ^J
- # (number sign) to ^N
- & (ampersand) to ^O
- ~ (tilde) to ^F
- Never start or end file or folder names with a space, and avoid spaces in filenames that will be uploaded to a Web or SFTP server.
- Avoid putting more than one period in a filename, and don’t put a period after a filename extension.
- Never assume that names are case sensitive—always make sure that similarly named items differ by more than just case.
If all that seems like a lot to keep in mind, here’s the simple rule that will ensure your filenames will work everywhere:
Name files only with uppercase (A-Z) and lowercase (a-z) letters, digits (0-9), and the hyphen (-) and underscore (_), plus a single period (.) and extension.
(Featured image by iStock.com/cosmin4000 and smartstock)
Social Media: You might think that you can name a file or folder any way you want, but macOS and Windows have restrictions on which characters you can use, and the prevalence of cloud sharing services makes it all the more important to avoid prohibited characters.