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Apple acquires Pixelmator

pixelmator.com

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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#391

Post by ozten »

prmoustache wrote: post #379
ozten wrote: post #163

Bummer. I switched to Affinity (Photo, Designer) this year and am very happy. You can buy a lifetime license across all platforms (iPad, Mac, Windows) for a fixed price. It is great to have high quality software that is not a subscription.

I am not a fan of subscriptions but old versions of Photoshop were also lifetime licenses and a 10y old professional software still works exactly the same now as 10 years ago. Yet I don't see much professional gfx artists and workers claiming they are still using the old licensed software instead of whining about the sub. Is this trolling or are people just slave of the lure of the newest and latest? I like new usefu…

> 10y old professional software still works exactly the same now as 10 years ago

Great point for Windows. iOS, Mac, and Linux evolve too much to reliably run 10 year old binaries.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#392

Post by Applejinx »

93po wrote: post #326
SupremumLimit wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: make everyone an incredible offer Step 2: get them all hired away from your competitor who is now out of business Step 3: in a year or two, restructure all these people out (or just fire them if your jurisdiction allows) Step 4: your competitor is gone, and all it cost was a year or two of salaries. Seems like a great way to help out budding monopolies.

it seems like you can just prevent this by providing incentives for your employees to not get poached, and also companies that mass-hire-mass-fire would get reputations for doing so, and people wouldn't fall for it. making it illegal instead of requiring businesses to actually pay for retention and loyalty in a free market way is so silly

The 'people wouldn't fall for it' is in error. People aren't rational actors and don't have complete information. That's a bold statement, I know, but it's at least as correct as 'people wouldn't fall for it'. I'm pretty sure it's easy to make a case for 'too many people will fall for it'.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#393

Post by wut42 »

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 seems to be back in iOS 18 "Add cloud cover percentage by cloud layer to the current weather forecast"

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#394

Post by generalpf »

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…

BuddyBuild was acquired by Apple and used for their server CI platform, almost immediately cutting off Android support. That was a shame because it was a great platform for Android builds.

https://www.biv.com/news/technology/bye-bye-android-apple-ac...

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#395

Post by Applejinx »

vr46 wrote: post #152
butterknife wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the AI hubris but Logic still does not do fades or zero crossings when cutting audio clips. And don't get me started on the audio zoom. This is basic stuff! It feels like the audio code was not touched since emagic days.

In defence of the AI hubris, I laid down a funky rhythm guitar track, verse and chorus, and then fiddled around with the AI bassist and AI drummer and blow-me-down-with-a-feather if the results weren't outstanding. Like a perfect demo. I was able to send that to my mate and say, here you go, here's a demo with guide tracks for the bass. For making demos and filling-out sketches, I'm thrilled. Here's the audio, and al…

Huh. Doesn't return to the one, ever? You've got sort of a I - III - IV thing going on, and it just goes to IV and stays there forever. Did you think that was the root?

Fun toy, though! I take it you extended it backwards into an intro, or you have playing it can read that you muted, leading into your guitar stuff. Did you play to a click or is it reading your tempo too?

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#396

Post by wmeredith »

JimDabell wrote: post #5
minimaxir wrote: post #2

I'm half unsurprised as Pixelmator was one of the apps that was extremely-tightly-integrated with Apple's APIs and ecosystem and was an excellent app as a result, and half worried that Apple will make unpopular changes to it as it's a less user-friendly app by necessity. (see also recently: Apple's Dark Sky acquisition and the worse integration of it into the Weather app)

The other half of this equation is Sketch. Pixelmator is great for photos, Sketch is great for vectors and UI design. Both committed to being first-class macOS applications. But Sketch has steadily been losing ground to Figma. I wonder if an acquisition is on the cards there as well?

I adore Sketch, but the industry standard has been Figma. It's a web app and it beats the pants of Sketch for collaboration.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#397

Post by wmeredith »

startupLankan wrote: post #20
pier25 wrote: post #12

Very interesting move. Adobe must be trembling. Lots of people have already left Premiere and AE for Resolve. If Apple offers Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives it will remove the need to pay for the Adobe subscription for a lot of Mac users (that will probably be the case for me).

yet building an adobe alternative could be daunting. Even for Apple. Adobe products have been polished for decades. IMHO Taking on Adobe is as hard as a another company taking on Apple by building apple like products.

Calling Adobe apps polished is a hot take. Adobe products are houses that have been added onto until the learning curve on their apps is similar to that of taking up playing a pipe organ.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#398

Post by vr46 »

AlanYx wrote: post #51
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…

One of the senior Aperture team members went off to use the underlying OS RAW infrastructure in product called Gentleman Coders Nitro. It's a decent but little known Lightroom alternative with no subscription, albeit without all the recent Lightroom AI-infused features. It does have AI masking though.

A fantastic product but the colour science does not look great from a first play, and I don't know if seven days is long enough to figure it out. If I had a job I'd pull the trigger anyway, but too much of a luxury right now. I can't believe I did not know about this application. Shocking marketing! :D

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#399

Post by macintux »

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.

Late this summer, Apple Weather finally lost me (I'm in Indiana).

We had a storm roll through, and the temperature dropped 15º. Guess whose weather app continued to report the higher temperature?

But the real problem: rain forecasts were painfully unreliable. I spend the summer driving topless in my Jeep, and it's helpful to know these things in advance.

Well, that and the new UI was so much more cluttered than Dark Sky's, but I stomached that for years before throwing in the towel.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#400

Post by tiahura »

dahart wrote: post #359
tiahura wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unethical by whom? The now richer employees? Or the salty cheapskate?

Investors and founders to name two. Taking over a company via mass poaching would absolutely invite lawsuits. The government for another. Hiring all the employees of another company is regulated, and it could be seen as anti-competitive behavior. You’re thinking of individual poaching, not whole company poaching.

I'll admit, as an attorney, this isn't my specialty, and every jurisdiction varies, but the ye olde common law of tortuous interference requires something more than mere competition, this is America, not the EU.

2 DAN B. DOBBS, THE LAW OF TORTS §§ 448-52 (2001)("you are thus free to induce my customers, employees, or suppliers to deal with you instead of me, as long [as] they are not bound to me by contract").

Restatement (Second) of Torts § 768 (1979) (stating that interference with a competitor’s contractual relations is permissible if it does not employ wrongful means and is intended to advance the competing interest).

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Sturges, 52 S.W.3d 711, 726 (Tex. 2001) (" we conclude that to establish liability for interference with a prospective contractual or business relation the plaintiff must prove that it was harmed by the defendant's conduct that was either independently tortious or unlawful. By "independently tortious" we mean conduct that would violate some other recognized tort duty.").

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