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Apple acquires Pixelmator

pixelmator.com

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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#211

Post by ascagnel_ »

alsetmusic wrote: post #19
extr wrote: post #6

Makes sense. I'm a pretty casual user of Pixelmator Pro but it really does feel like a first party Apple app.

It does, and this makes me nervous that they’ll screw it up. I’m a user of Apple Logic Pro and they’ve done a decent job of keeping it going for what, fifteen plus years? But I can’t offhand think of any other popular acquisition that they’ve improved upon and the kept improving off the top of my head (I’m sure there’s more that I’m not thinking of, maybe CUPS) without just sorta forgetting. At least there’s still Ac…

The "Shortcuts" app was an acquisition and is fairly powerful as a graphical system automation app. I created a shortcut that looks up the overnight weather at my home, and determines if it needs to turn on the AC to run for ~30 minutes before I go to bed so the room is comfortably cool.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#212

Post by iwontberude »

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…

I want to point out that the same management team that brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps. Apple drag and drops teams into their org chart and gives them tons of autonomy.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#213

Post by spacedcowboy »

vr46 wrote: post #173
segasaturn wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to How does that happen? Forgetting to periodically save their work and have the app crash, or was it saving incorrectly and producing corrupted files?

Going back to 2007, so can't remember super clearly, but IIRC the db was a sqlite like thing and all info about everything was stored in this, and it was vulnerable to corruption, plus all versions and thumbnails were mixed together with original image files - a total mess. The digital photo management landscape wasn't so mature then, and some people trusted Aperture with their original images whereas later versions…

Aperture 1.0 was very slow. The stories I could tell about its genesis...

I came on board just before 1.0 release, and for 1.5 we cleaned things up a bit. For 2.0 we (mainly I) completely rewrote the database code, and got between 10x and 100x improvements by using SQLite directly rather than going through CoreData. CoreData has since improved, but it was a nascent technology itself back then, and not suited to the sort of database use we needed.

The SQLite database wasn't "vulnerable to corruption", SQLite has several articles about its excellent ACID nature. The design of the application was flawed at the beginning though, with bindings used frequently in the UI to managed objects persisted in the database, which meant (amongst other things) that:

- User changes a slider

- Change is propagated through bindings

- CoreData picks up the binding and syncs it to disk

- But the database is on another thread, which invalidates the ManagedObjectContext

- Which means the context has to re-read everything from the database

- Which takes time

- By now the user has moved the slider again.

So: slow. I fixed that - see the other post I made.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#215

Post by iwontberude »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #130
blihp wrote: 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…

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 han…

And the management team that brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps to this day. Apple doesn't wipe out management during acquisitions, it permanently entrenches them in their structure.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#217

Post by lynndotpy »

crazygringo wrote: post #85
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.

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 miss the visualization, but IMO the biggest feature loss is the history feature. You could select any day in the past, even going back decades, and get historical weather information.

The hyper-local rain forecasts were always accurate for me with DarkSky. The "rain starting in 3 minutes, stopping in 10" was accurate. But right now, Apple Weather is telling me it's cloudy and raining where I'm at, and I'm looking outside my window to clear skies and dry ground.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#218

Post by saaaaaam »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #174
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.

> Is there any way this can go bad? 6 months they'll realize they can't fit in with Apple's culture and most of the team will hit the road.

You'd assume that their new deal with Apple will involve a certain amount of stock based comp with a cliff. Golden handcuffs.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#219

Post by saaaaaam »

grahamj wrote: post #199
chias wrote: post #117

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] wh…

[flagged]

and/or other people reflective of a non-heteronormative worldview.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#220

Post by awwstn »

madeofpalk wrote: post #191
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.

On the other hand, Testflight has a pretty good acquisition story. It got "merged into main" and is now a first class citizen of the iOS development ecosystem. Workflow being acquired and turning into Shortcuts is a pretty successful outcome IMHO. Beats still continues to make slightly cheaper headphones. FoundationDB is still there. Apart from Dark Sky, what other products with users has Apple acquired and shut down…

Shazam is a huge success story!
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