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Apple acquires Pixelmator

pixelmator.com

181–190 of 597 posts

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#181

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.

Asking a question isn't worrying.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#182

I know this isn't likely... but a part of me is going, "and so the downfall of Adobe supremacy begins..." evil cackling It would be hilarious watching them scramble to actually compete with an equal footing player for once. (Yes, I know I'm probably delusional, but it would be funny to watch)

One can only hope.

Although it's not totally unlikely either. There's a decent sized market of prosumer/enthusiast photographers where CaptureOne is a bit overkill, but DarkTable isn't intuitive enough compared to Lightroom. They don't want the subscription, but have no other real choice ever since Aperture was killed.

If Apple continues development of Photomator and continues to improve on it I can see it starting to eat away at Lightroom's marketshare for the enthusiast/semi-pro market.

Cross-platform is a non issue as that market is majority macOS already.

I'm hopeful, as someone that has a photography business on the side, that this works out. I miss Aperture, and CaptureOne isn't as good as batch editing for events as Lightroom Classic (although it's improved quite a bit lately). If Apple can get it on par or better than LR classic, and keep the one-time purchase model, I'm all in. Screw adobe.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#183
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who is "fretting". Someone just asked one question.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#184
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this. Aperture was a mess. Some of the "full" edit tools from Aperture are actually lurking in Photos which is a fairly competent photo editor on macOS surprisingly. I think they have a chance. I know a couple of professional photographers. One uses Capture One and only for tethering support. The other an ancient copy of Lightroom that was a one time purchase and use that for persistent contract work for one of…

I was quite surprised (pleasantly) with the editing features available in Photos. I rarely use it on the desktop, and primarily only use it on the device I took the image, but to see how much more in depth the editing was on desktop was one of those that I thought for a second might make me switch to using it for device captured image editing. For non-device camera images, I still use full tilt apps as that's just my…

Yeah I’m currently using lightroom for my mirrorless. I export that to photos then share / keep the flattened images in there.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#185
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…

Note that this hasn’t happened with Shazam, miraculously

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#186
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exploring is not wasted. Fretting is wasted.

It is wasted, because in this situation you’re forced to do it. If you end up not switching, all the time you spent trying something else comes to nothing. If you do switch, you were still forced to spend a bunch of time looking for something.

For me, "nothing" is rarely true. When I've had to learn a tool that operated in a different way, I've often come away realizing that I could think about a common task differently, or that there are capabilities I didn't realize I wanted.

I this case I'm thinking of domain-specific tools meant for creation or curation, like an IDE, image editor, word processor, etc. That wouldn't apply to bureaucratic paperwork-type tools, where learning the site is typically a one-off and is pure waste.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#187
Putting 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 months of an Adobe subscription (I don't even know exactly what that costs any more because Pixelmator + parts of the Affinity suite got me out of their clutches).

Adobe must not be stoked about this news. And I'll just keep my fingers crossed this all heads in a direction that's more Logic than Dark Sky.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#189

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.

As a longtime user of both: > Apple Weather is less reliable than DarkSky Doesn't seem that way to me. The predicted rain over the next hour looks the same as it did in DarkSky, and you can view the scrub the predicted clouds map timeline and see that it's predicting the same stuff. And the real-life quality where I live has shown no change, nor is there any obvious reason why there would have been. I presume Apple b…

I think weather is ... fine. I liked darksky better, it was more focused and less cluttered. It's purely a design, not functionality thing for me.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#190
As a long time Pixelmator user, this really worries me. I loved DarkSky and then Apple acquired and killed it without a good replacement (I switched to Wunderground because Apple Weather is inaccurate, especially for precipitation predictions).
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