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Apple acquires Pixelmator

pixelmator.com

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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#281

Post by kstrauser »

azinman2 wrote: post #274
kstrauser wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish every acquisition improved the end product as much as Workflow's did. All Apple's OSes got better for embracing it. I can write and have written AppleScript things, but Shortcuts is a vastly more convenient UX for the things it's good at.

What do you use it for?

Let's see, I have 157 shortcuts defined at the moment. That wasn't due to some mass effort, just a bunch of little things that accumulated over time.

I have one shortcut that shares the song I'm currently listening to in Apple Music to Mastodon. I use iA Writer for my work notes, and another shortcut creates a new note with today's date with wiki links to yesterday's and tomorrow's notes. (I use that one with Keyboard Maestro: if I'm in iA Writer and press F2, it opens that note (or creates it if it didn't already exist)). One runs on a cron job and copies any new links I've added to GoodLinks to my Pocket account so that it'll sync to my Kobo. Here's one that runs a custom sorting script on my OmniFocus projects. This one dims my office lights; I use Keyboard Maestro (again) to link it to one of the buttons on my Stream Deck.

Basically, for me it's the equivalent of shell scripting for GUI apps. I wouldn't want to write a whole app with it, but for quick and dirty automation jobs it's terrific.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#283

Post by tiahura »

jshier wrote: post #237
crazygringo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple Weather is still missing some of the data that Dark Sky exposed, like cloud coverage percentage and other niche info. I also find the UX a little worse, as I like more data at a glance. But you can tell they're using the Dark Sky backend, as it has the same bugs that Dark Sky had, like slowing loading map tiles which sometimes fail altogether. And there was the time they accidentally reenabled the Dark Sky API…

“cloud coverage percentage”

Have you tried windows?

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#284

Post by ezfe »

wrongotron wrote: post #254
crazygringo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am a regular runner. The accurate micro-forecasts on Dark Sky were a huge help for me to plan ahead so I wouldn't get caught in the rain. Apple Weather mostly fails at this. Additionally, I really dislike the Apple Weather dataviz for the day's trends. This time of year, the my local weather can wildly change from early morning to late afternoon, and I want to plan what to wear. I could glance quickly at Dark Sky a…

How does it fail? Are you qualitatively saying it's just...worse?

I understand UI criticism but I've seen lots of people instantly saying it's worse when it's working just as well as Dark Sky ever did for me.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#285

Post by newsclues »

tigeroil wrote: post #40
vr46 wrote: 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…

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.

Pros hate UI redesigns

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#286

Post by madeofpalk »

awwstn wrote: post #220
madeofpalk wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

We'll put Shazam in the Filemaker category of continuing to exist, but not really benefiting from Apple.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#287

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

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.

Coming from the perspective of a non-DarkSky user, the DarkSky acquisition added tons of value for me. Apple's iOS Weather app is better than it's ever been in terms of accuracy and feature-breadth.

It seems that Apple made things worse for the (small number of) DarkSky users while improving things for (a huge number of) default-app users.

I hope they do the same thing with Pixelmator.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#289

Post by judge2020 »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #287
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.

Coming from the perspective of a non-DarkSky user, the DarkSky acquisition added tons of value for me. Apple's iOS Weather app is better than it's ever been in terms of accuracy and feature-breadth. It seems that Apple made things worse for the (small number of) DarkSky users while improving things for (a huge number of) default-app users. I hope they do the same thing with Pixelmator.

I've heard that Apple Weather is much less reliable nowadays outside of the U.S., but I agree that it's super accurate for me on the East coast of the states.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#290

Post by spacedcowboy »

vr46 wrote: post #256
spacedcowboy wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aperture was utterly paranoid about data-loss. There was the SQLite database that was run on its own thread, and regularly synced to disk, the hard-sync that waited until the data had flushed through to the disk platters. In addition to that there was a whole structure of plist files, one per image, that meant the database could be reconstructed from all these individual files, so if something had somehow corrupted t…

Again, thanks for the interesting insights. I personally witnessed one incident I mentioned, and for my sins tried to help my panicking classmate, I think we reached a good-enough outcome. On the subject of raw files processing, I have yet to find an ideal system, if it is even possible, where edits to get a RAW photo to its final state are handled and stored in some deterministic format, yet somehow connected to sai…

Adobe have (had?) a DNG file-format that encompasses the RAW data, JPEGs and the changes, but by the simple fact that adjustments are application-specific anything you do to modify the image won't be portable. It's basically a TIFF file with specific tags for photography.

The thing is, if you want any sort of history, or even just adequate performance, you want a database backing the application - it's not feasible to open and decode a TIFF file every time you want to view a file, or scan through versions, or do searches based on metadata, or ... It's just too much to do, compared to doing a SQL query.

The Aperture Library was just a directory, but we made it a filesystem-type as a sort of hint not to go fiddling around inside it. If you right-clicked on it, you could still open it up and see something like

Masters were in the 'Masters' folder, previews (JPEGs) inside the 'Previews' folder, Thumbnails (small previews) were in the 'Thumbnails' folder. Versions (being a database object) had their own 'Versions' folder inside the 'Database' folder. This was where we had a plist per master + a plist per version describing what had been done to the master to make the version.

We didn't want people spelunking around inside but it was all fairly logically laid out. Masters could later be referenced from places outside the Library (with a lower certainty of actually being available) but they'd still have all their metadata/previews/thumbnails etc inside the Library folder.

1: https://imgur.com/a/disk-structure-within-aperture-library-m...

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