To avoid this from happening again, you can close and reopen the document/ go to document browser/ manually save and restart the app/ duplicate the file regularly. Especially if you should get the "saving bug" error message, you should not only restart the app but also close and reopen the document to make it work again. It's only fully saved, once you see the thumbnail in the document browser updating to reflect your current canvas, and the Cloud syncing symbol is finished.

This bug has been around for years at this point and they mentioned a few times in the past that it's a system wide bug (also happening in Pages & Numbers). It happens more frequently, the bigger your document becomes.

I believe the only way for them to fix it reliably, other than hoping Apple will at some point (perhaps with the big "bug fix" update with iPadOS 27), is to switch back to custom gallery. Since it's somehow connected to the system document browser. That's at least what I was told in the past via email, not sure if anything changed since then. I really like the document browser, but I'd much prefer a custom gallery again, if it means reliable saving. They also did a poll about that a while back on X.

Secondary color will be improved in new Artstudio. It will be used as brush Aux color. UI will be changed so it will be not so easy to change secondary color by mistake.

Is there any rough timeframe for when the big update will be released?

Quote from: Icezimy on December 20, 2024, 06:32:02 PM

What will be the benefits/differences for Artstudio Pro once it's ported to the new graphics engine?

1. We wrote ArtKit engine from scratch, in pure Swift, while Artstudio Pro is written in obj-c. Here is the list of advantages:
- it is in pure Swift and supports both OpenGL and Metal, so it will be possible to make Artstudio for Windows / Android, but don't expect that soon
- faster - because Swift is faster than objc)
- faster and more memory efficient - we had a lot of experience from Artstudio so we made many thing in a different, more efficient way
- we separated stroke processing from other things so we have better control on stroke stabilization / smoothing / dynamics etc, we may add more options in brush editor
- we implemented texture compressing so the memory usage will be lower and it will improve performance in large documents (a lot of layer, big dimension) because it will first compress layer data on low memory, then save it to disk if there is still no free memory
- besides we learnt a lot of things when working on a new engine and on Notestudio which is vector based app

2. We switched to SwiftUI in Notestudio and wrote separate framework for the UI - ArtUI. It will improve UI a lot
- we made draggable panel mechanism (used in Notestudio), we are going to use it in Artstudio too
- SwiftUI has better support of localizations, light/dark mode, controls refreshing, small animation here and there etc

Things in iOS are changing very fast. To make Artstudio alive we had to make really big steps every few year. First Artstudio was released in 2010, then rewritten almost from scratch in about 2015, then rewritten almost from scratch again in 2019 and released as Artstudio Pro, it seems it's time for the next big step...

All of that sounds very exciting, but especially that it will be even faster and that bigger documents will perform better! Can’t wait to see what the future of Artstudio Pro will bring and also what new features will be available

Will some of the longer requested features, e.g. color coded layers, clipping mask for groups, etc. be released together with the new graphics engine, or will the new engine come first and then other new features after?

I also wonder if the draggable panels might decrease or limit the amount of tools that can be put into the tool bar right now? (Hopefully not) Also probably an option somewhere in the settings to reset the panels to “default position” and an option to “lock” them in place, so you can’t accidentally move them while drawing, would make sense.

And please whatever you guys do, please never add any kind generative AI tools to Artstudio😅🙏

Thanks for all the hard work, Artstudio Pro has been my main painting program for years and it’s the best! 😊

What will be the benefits/differences for Artstudio Pro once it's ported to the new graphics engine?

But why would anybody want to work in photoshop if you are using Artstudio pro? Seems like a bad idea to be like yeah here take this and leave the app so you can use the competition?

In my case mostly for being able to share/sell brushes with other artists who don't use Artstudio Pro. Also I believe a number of artists work with multiple different apps depending on the project and .abr is unfortunately the only one usable in many different drawing/animation programs

If you go to Preferences > General > Video Recording, you can change the video recording quality to 4K and then your timelapse exports shouldn’t be blurry anymore. c: Though if I remember correctly, it only works for newly created documents after you change it.

it was gone for a bit, but i suddenly started getting the "Document was not saved! Please close and reopen the document" popup every autosave or if i manually save

Since I tested the fix, I only got this same error message once, while saving with iCloud (it only happened after ~20h, of now 70 + hours of working), however, it did actually still continue saving normally after that (despite the error message) and no progress was lost.

So it's important to understand what exactly was happening to you? Did you actually lose any progress of your art, or did you just get the error message? And are you saving your documents on iCloud or local storage?

Hey there!

I'm wondering if recently something was changed regarding the saving bug?

Yesterday I was working on a painting, when I left my iPad for 10 mins. And when I came back, I was shocked to see that none of my progress was saved. I've lost around 2+ hours of work... this is the first time that this has happened to me while NOT using iCloud as storage location... and I also got no notification for a saving issue or anything.. needless to say, that this was really infuriating.

And I really don't believe that Apple will address this issue anytime soon. It's been happening since over half a year already! So, at this point, it's really up to you (Lucky Clan) to fix this somehow. Even if it means going back to a custom gallery (since you mentioned this is likely the root cause for it, that somethings wrong with Apples gallery view, which also explains why the same thing happens in Pages and Numbers). Or even if it means changing something bigger inside the app, so it's not so reliant on bugs from Apples side like this...

This is just such a gigantic setback in the overall app reliability and functionality it's actually driving me nuts at this point... none other drawing app has this issue. And it's a huge one, since you literally cannot rely on ASP saving the work you do, and it's been going on for months and now only seems to get even worse... I was able to circumvent this bug mostly by not using iCloud (I would still get saving issues, but could just restart/reopen the document and wouldn't lose hours of work) which was already inconvenient enough. But now loosing hours of work again, even though I'm NOT using iCloud, is just bad.

Idk how to say this more nicely at this point, since it's really just so freaking annoying, and I just cannot grasp how finding a way to fix such a HUGE bug, isn't the number 1 priority for you right now...

And I'm curious to know how many other people dealing with this bug? Which is why I'm posting it on the forum too, instead of via email only. I saw it mentioned a few separate times on here, but it always gets buried/forgotten again, as the forum isn't that active lately.

Please just make this a priority...

Off-topic:

There is another unrelated bug that reappeared, idk when. But exporting animations as HEVC doesn't work properly (colors are wrong and frames are not playing correctly). I think it's only when exporting with transparency. Also, when using "undo" after playing an animation, it undos every single playback, instead of undoing the strokes/adjustment/etc. made.

Also, somewhat recently, I experienced some seemingly random crashes of the app, something that hasn't really happened before like this. Just thought I should mention, even if I don't know the cause yet.

Thanks!