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Apple acquires Pixelmator

pixelmator.com

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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

one hundred percent - and i felt like when they initially launched garageband they were doing a great play to get people (particularly folks who dabble and school kids) invested in the logic-style workflow to build up their familiarity so that folks entering the industry would demand it in their workplaces... and then it all just fell off. they actually seemed to want to have that kind of flow in place for basically every kind of professional tool! imovie->FCP and garageband->logic being the prime examples (or maybe only, I guess) that I can think of.

I assume there was some shift in how they thought about serving professionals and where apple's place in the work ecosystem was because the beginning of the end for apple pro software in terms of prominence aligned roughly, it seems, with things like the discontinuation of the xserve line (which itself wound down as apple seemed to rebrand itself as a consumer device company first on the heels of the iPhone's success.)

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#132
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app and Apple doesn’t actually want to have a separate image editor (let alone two).

They used to have Aperture competing with Lightroom and then decided pro photography wasn’t a space they needed to be in, has something changed where now they want their own Photoshop competitor?

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#134

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?

Did they? Do you have a link? All I can find is some rumors about reducing production.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

not to well actually you, but i assume you meant objective c? c# is a microsoft thing.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#136

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.

Can you get MyRadar on iphone? It's no DarkSky, but it's the best replacement I've found (for Android at least).

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#137
post #110

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…

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 buyout, employees just make the same old salary at the new company. In my method, they make a ton more and are more likely to stay

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#138
post #52
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aperture could have been amazing, but it was slow, buggy and suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to - just as Lightroom appeared. FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected. I went all in on Logic, however, and that has proved a great buy, no subscription model, fantastic extras and works super well. If they can rebuild a enthusiast-targeted set of…

> FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected. I'm more of a casual when it comes to Final Cut Pro rather than a daily driver, but it does seem like the last year or two they've started to get back into the fight again. Some of the 360 VR/AI/multi-iOS camera changes seem to go more hand-in-hand with "Apple gives a shit about content creation again", buttressed by Apple Vision Pro and spatial photography. As so…

Yea, if Apple is going to want their VR products to succeed they're going to have to rely heavily on some vertical integration on video capture/editing software, and FCPX (and now Pixelmator for the spatial photography efforts) seems like the natural place to put those efforts.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#139
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…

The abandoning of FCPX after surviving the reputation blow it took during the transition from 7->X is baffling to me. In the mid 2010s it was actually a fantastic NLE, I used it for professional work for a solid decade. When it comes to speed editing there’s just nothing like it. But starting around 2019 or 2020 they just began to let it languish. To say they don’t have feature parity with resolve and premiere is bey…

I was around there ~2019 the original FCPX design team was purged when the art director from a print magazine took over for the pro apps. He brought in people worked on stuff like the LinkedIn website, ESPN baseball apps and Disney games. Engineers and QA were annoyed having to explain concepts like timecode

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#140
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exploring is not wasted. Fretting is wasted.
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