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Apple acquires Pixelmator

pixelmator.com

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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#121

Post by mortenjorck »

pier25 wrote: post #37
hbosch wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, because the overlap between After Effects and Resolve is insignificantly small. Anyone using AE for post-processing only has been in the wrong app for years already.

plenty of people doing motion graphics with Resolve and now Rive is really taking the 2D world by storm

Some people may not be familiar with the fact that BlackMagic Design incorporated its motion graphics and VFX package, Fusion, into Resolve a few years ago. It's an incredibly powerful compositing package, though its node-based architecture may present a nontrivial learning curve for people accustomed to the pre-comping workflow of AE.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#122

Post by sgjohnson »

dylan604 wrote: post #96
TimTheTinker wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple gained so much professional mindshare in the early 2000s with FCP, Shake, Logic, Aperture, Motion, XSan, XServe, etc. I worked in a graphics/media studio at the time, and the excitement was palpable. And creating things with those apps was just fun . It feels like a shame that only vestiges of that time remain today. The bar is much higher in some ways (lower in others), it takes a lot more skill and specialize…

It seems there was a huge loss of software in the 32bit->64bit switch. Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift (or whatever the specific languages were). FCPX is such a different version than FCP. Just like QTPlayerX is so different than QT Player 7 Pro was such a regression of capabilities. I doubt there was a "this is the best QT Player we've ever released" on that "upgrade".

> Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift

C#, not Cocoa. Cocoa is an API. You can write a Cocoa application in Swift, if you really want to (but you should really use SwiftUI for anything new)

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#123

Post by cesaref »

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 It has really truly excellent included instruments (such as Alchemy) and effects, but the app itself feels rather outdated.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?

I believe the Logic team are still based in Germany, where the original Emagic team that produced Logic were based, so it's not that they are languishing, but an intentional decision has been made (either by them or Apple) to keep this structure.

Logic has such a long history, it's not surprising that it shows it's age, and has 'weird' behaviour that you wouldn't choose today. It's got stuff in there from the early 90s, as it started out as a midi sequencer before pulling audio into the product.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#124

Post by NobodyNada »

butterknife wrote: post #97
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.

All the AI hubris but Logic still does not do fades or zero crossings when cutting audio clips. And don't get me started on the audio zoom. This is basic stuff! It feels like the audio code was not touched since emagic days.

Logic Pro has both of those features: https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/edit-fades-lgcpf7c0... https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/snap-edits-to-zero-...

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#125

Post by ihateolives »

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.

Yes you are. You probably live in the US, Canada or the UK.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#126

Post by surfingdino »

robenkleene wrote: post #53

Pure speculation: This is about visionOS. Photo editing is the least friction "pro" task to bring to a spatial computing platform. The other options I considered: ⁃ Renewed interesting in pro use cases in general. I don't see enough incentive for this. Apple's historical interest in this was winning over creatives, but particularly creatives interested in photography are already won. ⁃ Apple wanted the tech for somet…

Hasn't Apple just discontinued Vision Pro?

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#127

Post by FelipeCortez »

butterknife wrote: post #97
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.

All the AI hubris but Logic still does not do fades or zero crossings when cutting audio clips. And don't get me started on the audio zoom. This is basic stuff! It feels like the audio code was not touched since emagic days.

it doesn't? I never heard pops when trimming clips

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#128

Post by whalesalad »

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.

LOL. Yes, of course. It'll probably go terribly.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#129

Post by echoangle »

wkat4242 wrote: post #114
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 don't think Apple bought this to mothball it. That only makes sense if it competes with your own products. Which this doesn't.

I think the point was that cross-platform is mothballed now, there probably won't be a windows version of pixelmator now.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#130

Post by Eric_WVGG »

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…

On acquisitions like DarkSky (RIP), sure. This looks a lot more like a Logic-style acquisition.

Pixelmator would slot nicely into the same consumer set of productivity apps that ship with all Macs (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). Photomator will get them back into the market they abandoned when Aperture was shuttered.

Speaking of Aperture… am I the only person who remembers that Apple owns Claris? Why didn't Apple just hand off Aperture to Claris and say "just keep this thing working on new MacOS releases"?

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