I always loved pixelmator and they deserve it. 100% of it! Never greedy, ui and ux top notch and I never missed Photoshop once.
I’m of course a little scared of its future but I hope Apple will just integrate it inside the new OS updates.
Thank you Pixelmator team!!
Apple acquires Pixelmator
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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator
#322Putting concerns about future states aside, congrats to the Pixelmator team. I've been using the app for years and it's a really great piece of software, well designed and well built. It's always been incredible value for the price, especially given that it basically replaces Photoshop for a wide swath of the market without compromising on UX (which is a problem for other competitors) at a price point that's like 1-2…
I used to use Pixelmator when I was on a mac. Its great for what it does, but its much much more limited than photoshop. Frankly most people don't need Photoshop. The UI is intuitive enough. I'm on linux now but missed that "preview" app for format/size conversions.
(It has a fun mosaic tool that lets you take a bit of an image and tile it real time which is really fun).
>Adobe must not be stoked about this news
Probably any mac developer should be a little worried. Apple has a mixed history at best with these applications. They had a lightroom competitor (Apeture?) they just dropped out of the blue. (some photographers are still griping) The "final cut pro" upgrade made people start using adobe again. But apple seem to keep the music making stuff going.
Frankly adobe Shold actually port their stuff to linux. The "free" competition is getting good (Krita, Blender, Gimp...). I have a couple pieces I used Gimp to layer together going into a gallery next week. Frankly its different, but pretty good once you get used to the UI.
Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator
#323Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
ugh don't get me started about Aperture. I'm still salty about that.
I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc... Never understood the logic of getting rid of it. I know a few people who actually switched to mac because of Aperture
> I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc...
Me neither… I wanted to like Lightroom, which was the solution most of the community seemed to migrate to, but between the infuriating inconsistent UI and the predatory subscription model I did not use it for long. And now I have a Rube Goldberg thing that is janky and feels brittle.
Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator
#325Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what's the theory of harm behind such law. Employers competing over talent is... illegal? Explains a lot actually.
Step 1: make everyone an incredible offer Step 2: get them all hired away from your competitor who is now out of business Step 3: in a year or two, restructure all these people out (or just fire them if your jurisdiction allows) Step 4: your competitor is gone, and all it cost was a year or two of salaries. Seems like a great way to help out budding monopolies.
it seems like you can just prevent this by providing incentives for your employees to not get poached, and also companies that mass-hire-mass-fire would get reputations for doing so, and people wouldn't fall for it. making it illegal instead of requiring businesses to actually pay for retention and loyalty in a free market way is so silly
Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, thanks for the interesting insights. I personally witnessed one incident I mentioned, and for my sins tried to help my panicking classmate, I think we reached a good-enough outcome. On the subject of raw files processing, I have yet to find an ideal system, if it is even possible, where edits to get a RAW photo to its final state are handled and stored in some deterministic format, yet somehow connected to sai…
Adobe have (had?) a DNG file-format that encompasses the RAW data, JPEGs and the changes, but by the simple fact that adjustments are application-specific anything you do to modify the image won't be portable. It's basically a TIFF file with specific tags for photography. The thing is, if you want any sort of history, or even just adequate performance, you want a database backing the application - it's not feasible t…
Yeah, even DNGs don't really work because as you say, the edits are application specific. My entire workflow converted everything to DNG for about 15 years but now I don't bother.
The thing that Lightroom really got right was not trying to mix all this stuff and organizing the master files well, so it was extremely clear where source material lived. I certainly don't want to root around thumbnails and previews in randomly-named folders.
Aperture's interface could have been great with some decent performance, and some of those decisions seemed to have survived with the iPhoto Library. Perhaps one big-ass ball of mud works fine for consumers with small file sizes and no archival strategy, but it's too prescriptive for me. If they brought Aperture back, and incorporated Photoshop-like features, that would be interesting and cool, so long as they left photo management alone.
The lesson I took a long time to learn was to not have the RAW processor import your files and instead get Photo Mechanic to do it instead, because it does a better job, and just use the RAW processor to process RAWs.
XMP/ITPC has been around longer than I've had a digital camera, do you know why Aperture didn't make use of those?
Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand why companies buy other companies for the talent and not product. Why not just make everyone working there an incredible offer at the same time? It would cost so so so much less than these massive buy outs. Maybe not all of them would take you up on it, but if you buy the company a lot of them may not stick around post-buyout anyway. I feel like this would be a lot more effective also because in a…
> Why not just make everyone working there an incredible offer at the same time? Under civil law this is regarded as tortious interference. Businesses have a contract with their employees and if you interfere with it to harm the employer then you are liable for damages. If you tried to make a mass offer like this, the employer could likely get a judge to place an injunction against it immediately. If they don’t notic…
it's ridiculous how america is all about free markets except for the instances where rich people could lose money, then suddenly free markets are bad and evil
Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much, much more likely. The only acquisition I can think of that Apple has allowed to continue to exist is Shazam.
And Siri and Shortcuts.
I was worried Workflow was totally screwed as a product after Apple bought it, but they've done a really great job at turning it into Shortcuts and integrating it across all their platforms.
Being able to put Shortcuts into Control Center in iOS 18 is a handy option, if anyone missed that you can do that now.
Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator
#330apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while. aperture dying was a bummer, and final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them. it would be very neat if apple started to build the necessary portfolio of software to provide a viable, ideally not-subscription-based competitor to adobe's suite of products. they certainly have had the chops…
fwiw, you're forgetting Mainstage, which is the defacto industry standard (alongside Ableton, to an extent) for live performance. There's a cottage industry of Mainstage session sales and sound design that is funded by basically every theater production in the United States from high school to Broadway which is wild if you think about it.
Garageband is also way more popular than people realize. Logic, (which is Garageband+ since version 10, essentially) has a few features that anyone in that ecosystem really wants. Logic + Mainstage is still unbeaten for the value for recording/production/performance, while Ableton continues to rot and Bitwig gets slightly better (but is still no Logic, and costs 3x more for fewer features)
Final Cut had its lunch eaten by DaVinci and Premiere. And anyone with money was/is using Avid still, just like with Pro Tools.