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Apple acquires Pixelmator

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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#331

Post by 93po »

dahart wrote: post #177
whamlastxmas wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Multiple reasons. That it does happen should be reason to question your assumptions, rather than assume some obvious imagined alternative has been overlooked by everyone, right? While poaching one employee at a time might be usually legal, attempting to poach all employees of a company might not be legal, and either way is considered unethical. Paying off the investors may be the goal. Eliminating the product or comp…

Agree with the other person - there's nothing unethical about hiring people in right-to-work laws and systems however you like. employers can fire at any time with no reason, the reverse also has to be true that they can hire at any time with no reason

buyouts are often massive considering the alternative, which is the cost of recruiting and possibly inflated salaries for the people you recruit, which frankly happens often in buyouts anyway

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#332

Post by ModernMech »

JimDabell wrote: post #146
ModernMech wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not just about upscaling, please re-read what I wrote. iMovie can upscale. You just have to trick it into doing so, because you can't set the resolution. Also, you are limited to the 720, 1080, 4k etc. If you want to export a square movie you can't. Best option is to export from iMovie and crop it in iPhoto.

> you can't set the resolution You keep saying that, but you can set the resolution though. I set the resolution every time I export from iMovie. You’re telling me it doesn’t have an option I’ve used every single time I’ve opened the app. Your complaint is not that you can’t set the resolution, your complaint is that it doesn’t have the options you want.

Okay so how do I set the resolution of an output video to 100 x 100 in iMovie?

(The answer of course is that you cannot)

And yes, my complaint is that it doesn't have the options I want, which makes it a deficient video editor -- the same way an image editor not having history makes it deficient. I want to set arbitrary resolutions on the output video, not be relegated to 540 720 and 1080, and I don't want to have to do gymnastics to get it to upscale.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#333

Post by srockets »

selectodude wrote: post #104
dylan604 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Apple bought Logic over 20 years ago. I’d be surprised if it shared any code with the pre-acquisition version.

Why not? Current macOS ships code older than that.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#334

Post by cageface »

judge2020 wrote: post #289
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s worthless in Thailand. I was checking it last week with a Thai friend here in Bangkok. The forecast was clear skies while in fact we had an epic monsoon storm.

This is typical here.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#335

Post by 1123581321 »

Insanity wrote: post #265
39896880 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that this hasn’t happened with Shazam, miraculously

Ok so to be fair.. I own an iPhone for about 3 years now and only discovered it comes shipped with Shazam about 6 months ago and only used it twice since. When I told my wife (also a somewhat long-time iPhone user), she didn’t know it came build-in either. I’m not a power user, neither is my wife.. I don’t think it is all that well advertised.

That's interesting. Is Shazam a default control center button for new phones? I don't remember how mine got there. (There's still probably a discovery issue with those buttons as they're just icons.)

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#336

Post by ghaff »

knicholes wrote: post #303
ghaff wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving aside pricing specifics, the main issue with subscriptions is for products that you just fire up once in a great while. So long as the pricing is reasonable, I have no particular issue with subscriptions for products I use on a routine basis--especially if they're products that more or less require ongoing updates to remain useful.

Interesting! Do you think a credits-based pricing would be more fair? Only pay for it when you use it? Maybe pay per click? Maybe like how cloud providers charge based on how long you have it open?

Metered pricing is basically cloud pricing. Probably reasonable for some uses but uncommon for applications at least with major providers.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#337

Post by no_wizard »

thenberlin wrote: post #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…

I suspect this move is due to behind the scenes Adobe / Apple relations souring over the years.

Adobe used to be one of their biggest supporters and helped winning over users to the Mac platform.

This has diverged significantly over the years, and I think Apple is looking at Adobe and their business model and realizing that it both lucrative for them to have software that fills into this market to round out their creative pro apps suite and that Adobe increasingly becoming aggressive with cost / licensing and tactics to extract revenue aren't good for their ecosystem.

That's my working theory, at least.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#338

Post by config_yml »

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…

I don't think that's universally true though. An example would be Logic, which Apple kept improving after buying it and it's still a great piece of software.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#339

Post by pantulis »

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.

Pedantic note: Alchemy itself was brought in by Apple's acquisition of Camel Audio. So not Apple acquisitions go wrong.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#340

Post by dialup_sounds »

giobox wrote: post #312
pridkett wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a nice outcome. I’ve been missing a replacement for Aperture for years. I’m not a professional photographer, but I’ve got more than 30 years of photos inside of Apple Photos. Some old school scans or Photo CDs, some RAW from underwater (Photos does a poor job here), and a ton of iPhone photos. Bringing a more premium experience to Photos would be a great complement to how you can already shell out to Pi…

The big thing Aperture nailed though was photo-management workflows - it was never that great as an image editor . I don't see anything in Pixelmator that moves the needle in an Aperture/Lightroom-type direction by integrating photo management, which was the innovation Aperture and Lightroom brought back at their roughly similar original launch dates. Pixelmator is much more a photoshop alternative IMO. I'd put money…

Some time ago they split off Photomator as a more Aperture/Lightroom app.
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