Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple acquires Pixelmator

pixelmator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 597 posts

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#111

Post by VyseofArcadia »

bangaroo wrote: post #103
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.

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…

My mistake then, I thought you meant a more general social media kind of buzz.

Logic and Final Cut did at one point have that kind of buzz when they were a part of Apple's "wow look at all the pros using macs" Mac OS X comeback story.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#112

Post by dylan604 »

cyberpunk wrote: post #24
talldayo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adobe must be trembling. Adobe is probably popping open a champagne for every cross-platform Creative Cloud competitor that gets mothballed with Apple's capital. If Microsoft acquired Affinity next, the Adobe offices would look like a disco ball for a week.

I’ve never seen a graphics person using a windows machine in all my years in tech… Maybe I’m in some sort of bubble.

I've been forced to use Windows in the creative graphics world. Back long ago in the dark ages, I did layout/graphics for a 'zine that was all done on Windows NT with Adobe software delivered to press on a Syquest disk.

More recently (2017ish), I was on Windows 7 for another stint at graphics.

Maybe I've just had the misfortune that others have been able to avoid??

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#113

Post by askafriend »

blihp wrote: post #110
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 A…

Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt.

The difference here is how aligned the original team is with their acquirer...down to the corner radius on every button.

With other products like Dark Sky, the product is substantially different in philosophy or design.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#114

Post by wkat4242 »

talldayo wrote: post #14
pier25 wrote: post #12

Very interesting move. Adobe must be trembling. Lots of people have already left Premiere and AE for Resolve. If Apple offers Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives it will remove the need to pay for the Adobe subscription for a lot of Mac users (that will probably be the case for me).

> Adobe must be trembling. Adobe is probably popping open a champagne for every cross-platform Creative Cloud competitor that gets mothballed with Apple's capital. If Microsoft acquired Affinity next, the Adobe offices would look like a disco ball for a week.

I don't think Apple bought this to mothball it. That only makes sense if it competes with your own products. Which this doesn't.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#115

Post by giantrobot »

pier25 wrote: post #12

Very interesting move. Adobe must be trembling. Lots of people have already left Premiere and AE for Resolve. If Apple offers Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives it will remove the need to pay for the Adobe subscription for a lot of Mac users (that will probably be the case for me).

I'm not a fan of Adobe at all but I used to do a lot of work in Photoshop. The top features for nearly 30 years have not been the destructive editing portion of the app but the composition tools.

By composition tools I mean the layer, channel, and layer effects tools. Layer effects/adjustments and masks make for easy compositing and live readjustment. It's the live nature of these features which is helpful because you're having to constantly refine the look of things based on a client's feedback. Photoshop manages to handle all sorts of layering while still providing color correct output.

It's not glamorous but it's important and most supposed Photoshop competitors over the decades fail at it. Some tools do many of the same things but I don't know of apps that can do everything Photoshop does it that space.

It's fine to snipe at Photoshop users that only have very basic needs for which Photoshop is overkill. I don't do anything graphic design anymore so Pixelmator and Affinity Photo have my needs covered. I purchased both and they've been well worth the money. But if you want to actually go after professional Photoshop users, not just incidental users, you really need 100% of Photoshop's functionality. Otherwise you'll miss a must-have feature that some designer requires for their workflow.

As much as I've enjoyed Pixelmator it's not even 50% of Photoshop's capabilities. It's not even on par with the decades old Photoshop 6.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#116

Post by echoangle »

Can someone give some insight why acquisitions like this happen? Is it to take over the user base or is it actually about the product itself?

I am asking because I always hear of multi-million dollar acquisitions and wonder if apple (in this case) couldn't just create the same software themselves cheaper.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#117

Post by chias »

Call me jaded but

> Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

the vast majority of the time the exciting updates end up being:

1. The product you know and love will continue with no difference! We just have free funding! Isn't that great!

2. We have stopped sales of the product, but don't worry, if you already own it you can continue to use it.

3. On X date it will stop working. Please migrate over to [other thing] which only has a smallsubset of the features you came to us for. Thank you for coming on this wonderful adventure with us, we are so grateful that you trusted us, though obviously this was misplaced. Byeeeeee.

which, in fairness, is quite "exciting" if you rely on the software / service. Just not pleasantly exciting.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#118

Post by AndrewStephens »

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…

I am a Pixelmator Pro user and this move does not surprise me. The app has a very "first party, use MacOSX the way it is supposed to be used" feel to it and their website has always looked a lot like Apple's. I can't imagine them ever wanting to port the code to another OS.

I purchased Pixelmator Pro years ago. I think I bought it for half price in a sale but even at the current listed price of $50 it is a steal. I am in not way a pro image editor but it has done everything I needed it to.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#119

Post by ModernMech »

kstrauser wrote: post #25
segasaturn wrote: post #11

I love Pixelmator Pro, especially because of no subscription fee. If you own Pro for more than 4 months you're spending less money than you would on Photoshop!

It's the sweet spot for me. I don't edit images for a living, but I push pixels around enough for hobbies (e.g. making video game maps) that I want something user friendly and pleasant. Pixelmator Pro has way more features than I'll ever need or use, and all the ones I do need are ergonomic to me, a person who doesn't have decades of Photoshop muscle memory.

This is the market GIMP needed to fill but doesn't. It's definitely capable but it's never been "friendly and pleasant" to my eye.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#120

Post by [deleted] »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #102
crazygringo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN