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Apple acquires Pixelmator

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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#361

Post by grahamj »

kergonath wrote: post #324
sersi wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc... Never understood the logic of getting rid of it. I know a few people who actually switched to mac because of Aperture

> I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc... Me neither… I wanted to like Lightroom, which was the solution most of the community seemed to migrate to, but between the infuriating inconsistent UI and the predatory subscription model I did not use it for long. And now I have a Rube Goldberg thing that is janky and feels brittle.

Yep same here, tried it for a while but Adobe's idea of UI just does not work for me.

I reluctantly went to Photos, mainly because of ease of use on the phone for family members, but still I miss full tagging and smart album support.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#362

Post by DidYaWipe »

reaperducer wrote: post #351
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…

Pixelmator + parts of the Affinity suite got me out of their clutches I haven't used Pixelmator, but currently use Affinity as a replacement for Photoshop for my personal projects. Unfortunately, Affinity isn't yet good enough to replace Photoshop for work. Are you able to outline how Pixelmator stacks up against Affinity Photo?

I gave up on Affinity Photo after discovering that it degrades images as you edit them. Specifically, it blurs entire layers when you merge them. And it does so over and over, making the base layer worse each time. Therefore you can't trust it with your images. Affinity has refused to fix this, making excuses instead. Example here: https://youtu.be/QA8eVWOLL5I

Affinity is also unwilling to fix glaring UI blunders or omissions. For example, in Designer, people have been asking for a "print/no-print" toggle on layers for years. Everybody else has this. But nope; they have staunchly refused to add it.

So I bought Pixelmator. It's a little clumsy to use in some ways, but the authors have been good about responding to queries about it.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#364

Post by wslh »

toinbis wrote: post #9

Well done team Lithuania! Remember hearing Pixelmator founders giving a speech ~12 years ago. They were very vocal and repeated this many times: "Our marketing strategy is to just focus on the product". Not sure I agree with that statement, but they sure seem to followed it thoroughly. Congrats on the acquisition!

Time and patience pays when you have a great product.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#365

Post by dahart »

93po wrote: post #331
dahart wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like the other person, you’re arguing about individual hires, and not considering the implications of whole-company mass poaching.

Sure some buyouts are big. But plenty are small. Most aren’t “massive”. The histogram, I speculate, is probably something like the Zipf distribution: the frequency of buyouts of a given size is probably inversely proportional to the size, to a first approximation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#366

Post by abenga »

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!

Been a while since I needed this. Deezer has search built in, and I don't need to switch apps to play/add to a playlist after finding the song.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#367

Post by crazygringo »

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…

> Apple Weather requires this awkward tap and drag gesture to see actual temperature values through the day.

You mean scrolling horizontally to see the values?

It's not an awkward tap and drag, it's just scrolling.

But if you don't like scrolling (which I understand), then just tap without dragging, and it'll show you a full-screen graph with a curve representing the temperature throughout the whole day. It's fantastic.

The interface doesn't make it clear that it's tappable, I'll certainly admit. But I hope that helps you. The graph view only got added maybe a couple of years ago, and I think a lot of people maybe still don't know about it.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#368

Post by prmoustache »

thenberlin wrote: post #252
adastra22 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk, Apple is just as likely to kill it.

Though way less likely to turn it into a cursed subscription zombie.

Hasn't Apple gone the subscription route for ipad apps (I am fairly sure I read somewhere that Logic for iPad is subscription based)?

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#369

Post by al_borland »

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.

While I am also very sad about DarkSky, it doesn't always go that way. Shazam was purchased by Apple many years ago, and many people have no idea. It still a stand alone app, but got control center options and Siri integration (even for those who didn't have the app installed). While the app does push Apple Music a bit, it's largely clean and without other ads, which would probably not be the case if they were still on their own.

How Pixelmator goes will largely depend on their plan. Do they want an app in this space, the spiritual successor to MacPaint, or did they just want the underlying tech (and maybe the team) to add a couple features to Photos? If it's a new value-added app, I think it's great. If they are just going to add some minor tweaks to Photos and throw the rest away, that would be pretty horrible.

I was a Pixelmator user from its launch, but switched to Affinity a few years ago. If Apple does something good, I probably won't be tempted to buy the next version of Affinity whenever it comes out. I'm a very occasional user.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#370

Post by 39896880 »

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.

Shazam was bought to boost Siri’s ability to recognize music but Siri isn’t really good at much, so it hasn’t been fully absorbed. Now with AI eating the world I assume that functionality will get reproduced by a foundation model and actually integrated into the OS
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