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Apple acquires Pixelmator

pixelmator.com

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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#101

Post by mike_hearn »

lowkey_ wrote: post #81

I'd never heard of Pixelmator before (congrats to them on the exit), and: WOW their website already looks like an Apple website. The colors, the font, the logo with the same colors as Apple Photos, all the images that show a Mac window, the shade of red in the top right, the "machine learning" section that almost looks like Notes, and I scrolled down and it's all about how great Mac is. It seemed inevitable that Appl…

It's a really nice app, I use it all the time. Definitely feels like the sort of app Apple would have made themselves.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#102

Post by VyseofArcadia »

crazygringo wrote: post #94
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them. They're professional tools . For use by people who are paid to use them. You don't want there to be buzz, you want them to just work. Buzz is a godawful metric for useful software.

To the contrary, you want there to be buzz around their new features. As a professional, you need to keep up, and you want new features to reduce your busywork in the app. Buzz is actually a pretty good metric, because it means the product is being maintained and improved, and you want to be investing in tools that will continue to meet your needs over the next 10 years rather than become stagnant, and then you have…

I suppose we need to be more specific about what we mean by buzz.

I mean "buzz" to be a general enthusiasm about the software even among non-users. I recall times when there was quite a lot of this kind of buzz about both Logic and Final Cut, in part I think because they were a part of Apple's Mac OS X comeback story.

I suspect you mean "buzz" to be enthusiasm in the community of users of the tools. I know software I've worked on in the pass, the general public couldn't care less about our product, but new releases always got a lot of buzz in our forums. This kind of buzz might actually be a pretty good metric.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#103

Post by bangaroo »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #71
bangaroo wrote: post #7

apple'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…

> final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them. They're professional tools . For use by people who are paid to use them. You don't want there to be buzz, you want them to just work. Buzz is a godawful metric for useful software.

people who work in jobs tend to talk about their tools. i worked in tv for a while a couple decades back, i went to school for film, and thus i have many friends who do creative video editing and professional video editing and still follow the industry closely. i'm not talking about typical social media buzz, i'm talking about "companies moving on to the product" or even "companies continuing to use the product," or professionals choosing to invest in the tool for their work.

i've only seen businesses and creatives i know moving their workflows away from FCP and Logic. i've not talked to friends in the industry who are moving on to them. buzz may be a poor word to choose, but for example i have a friend who does a lot of in-house editing for a massive, national company that owns many local TV stations and they're moving from avid to _premiere_, of all things, which really feels shocking given that premiere for a long time felt like the hobbyist tool.

a good example of a tool that has industry buzz lately is davinci resolve, which has had a meteoric rise in prominence. i don't think that it's the same thing as the average person talking around the water cooler but more and more of my friends who work at networks or in production are starting to use resolve in their color and editing workflows, and it's a topic of discussion.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#104

Post by selectodude »

dylan604 wrote: post #77
tigeroil wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logic is a weird one. It has really truly excellent included instruments (such as Alchemy) and effects, but the app itself feels rather outdated. The mixer, whilst having had some nice features added since Logic 9, is in dire need of an update.

Wouldn't that be a sign of a product that was purchased by Apple and then left to languish as is with just enough effort to not let it rot?

Apple bought Logic over 20 years ago. I’d be surprised if it shared any code with the pre-acquisition version.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#105

Post by nesk_ »

mikey_p wrote: post #80

I'm still on Pixelmator classic 3.9 (it's what I have a license for) and it's great. Does everything I need easily as a casual user, and it hasn't changed in years! I've never even thought about upgrading.

The upgrade is worth it for vector image editing.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#106

Post by ModernMech »

JimDabell wrote: post #78
ModernMech wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It defaults to the maximum resolution of the first clip that you import. So if you import a 720p movie first and want to export to 4k later on, you can't. You can export smaller but not larger. To export at 4K, you have to get rid of everything, import a 4k clip, and put everything back. And even then, resolutions are preset, you can't do a custom resolution.

I think “iMovie can’t upscale” is a lot more accurate then. “iMovie doesn't allow you to select the resolution” is very misleading, because it does allow you to do that.

No, it's not just about upscaling, please re-read what I wrote. iMovie can upscale. You just have to trick it into doing so, because you can't set the resolution. Also, you are limited to the 720, 1080, 4k etc. If you want to export a square movie you can't. Best option is to export from iMovie and crop it in iPhoto.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#107

Post by balls187 »

turnsout wrote: post #90
lowkey_ wrote: post #81

I'd never heard of Pixelmator before (congrats to them on the exit), and: WOW their website already looks like an Apple website. The colors, the font, the logo with the same colors as Apple Photos, all the images that show a Mac window, the shade of red in the top right, the "machine learning" section that almost looks like Notes, and I scrolled down and it's all about how great Mac is. It seemed inevitable that Appl…

It's not that unique—a lot of Apple-ecosystem developers take heavy inspiration from Apple's design language.

Back before I switched to mac’s, the visual quality of applications for OSX vs Windows was night and day.

Coda (by panic) was one that I remember vividly.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#108

Post by latexr »

ablation wrote: post #84
lynndotpy wrote: post #68

Is there any way this can go bad? When Apple acquired DarkSky, they absolutely destroyed a service that I loved and relied on. Four years on, Apple Weather is less reliable than DarkSky, and not even close to feature complete. But DarkSky was a cross-platform service, whereas Pixelmator is software that's already Apple-only. I'm wondering how much I should be worried, and if I should already be abandoning ship.

Why worry about something you have no control over? Keep using it, but be exploring alternatives now in case it does. Don't waste energy fretting over this.

I feel like those ideas are contradictory. Exploring alternatives just in case is wasting energy.

For example, for months I’ve been thinking of trying Inkscape to replace Affinity Designer, yet I keep putting it off because I’m not exactly enthused about the idea of having to learn yet another vector app again and deal with all its bugs and quirks.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#109

Post by changing1999 »

comboy wrote: post #58
bangaroo wrote: post #7

apple'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…

Logic is stellar. Why would you feel like its being abandoned? Professional tools don't change UX every 2 years.

Logic falls into a weird space between pro (studio) software and home studio software. Professional studios mostly use Pro Tools and Cubase (Europe). Home users mostly migrated to Live. It's obviously an oversimplification but it does reflect the problem Logic is facing.

Live is far ahead of Logic in the electronic music space. With a streamlined UI and M4L it dominated the market for the new(ish) generation of musicians. Every single musician I know (100s) moved from Logic to Live within the last two decades. The only people I know who still use Logic are composers (Live lacks music notation) using laptops at home.

Not to say that Logic is not a great piece of software. Drummer tracks were revolutionary, built in plugins are solid.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#110

Post by blihp »

lynndotpy wrote: post #68

Is there any way this can go bad? When Apple acquired DarkSky, they absolutely destroyed a service that I loved and relied on. Four years on, Apple Weather is less reliable than DarkSky, and not even close to feature complete. But DarkSky was a cross-platform service, whereas Pixelmator is software that's already Apple-only. I'm wondering how much I should be worried, and if I should already be abandoning ship.

The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... most of what you liked about Pixelmator is likely no more over the next year or two. Depending on Apple's reasoning for the acquisition (i.e. how much of it was just for the talent vs the product) you'll may see some small glimpses of Pixelmator's influence a couple years from now in Apple's stuff. Most of the time Apple doesn't keep the acquired product around.
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