The landing page loads a whopping 6 MB of assets, the culprits particularly being two images at 3.2 and 1.8 MB. It was definitely not a fun experience on my lowly mobile network connection.
Agreed. Even if "beautiful" is a foundation of a company's strategy, I like it when they show me what I can do, and let me notice how beautiful they've made it.
I also wonder why someone would make a product that's not beautiful and delightful. It may not end up being beautiful or delightful for the users, but someone somewhere thought it was, right?
"Ladies and gentlemen: let's make an ugly and irritating product."
No, it's just priorities and trade-offs. There are lots of things that may be a higher priority than "beauty". Beauty is expensive. Often it has good ROI, but not always!
This sounds incredible, obviously the details are everything. Would be nice to see a comparison to other solutions, and an explanation of how infinite storage is possible/economical.
Hey, one of the founders of Pixelapse here. For context, our target demographic is graphic designers.
We initially started out with tiered pricing based on storage. However, based on usage, we actually found that people rarely hit their storage caps. A better barometer for us is the number of people working together, which we approximate with projects. In that regard, our pricing plans are similar to Github's. Public projects are free and unlimited. Private projects are paid.
What products would you say are comparable to yours? Perforce comes to mind, though that's more of a "check out, check in" model, where this appears to be more of a dropbox model?
I'm not understanding how a version is identified, though. Is a version stored on the server every time the file is saved?
I don't see anything about locking. How do you prevent two people from working on the same unmergeable file at the same time?
Speaking of merging, there is no mention of merging of text files. Is that not supported?
I'd say the model is most comparable to Dropbox in that it passively syncs your work in the background. The check-in, check-out approach works for developers but we found it to be too confusing for our target audience of designers. It's a bit of cognitive overhead to remember to constantly check-in, especially when using Photoshop, which crashes quite frequently.
Every save forms a new version online, but you can go back and retroactively mark certain versions as major milestones. Milestones are roughly equivalent to commits in Git.
Since we're primarily focused on graphic design formats, we don't attempt to do any merging of files since it's unclear that the end product would make much sense. We don't lock files either. If two users simultaneously edit the same file, one of them "loses" and shows up as a Conflicted copy that you can visually resolve in the Comparison view online.
If two users simultaneously edit the same file, one of them "loses" and shows up as a Conflicted copy.
From my perspective, that seems like a good feature to consider adding. Groups of artists are used to self-organizing so they don't end up conflicting in this way, but I think that's only because they haven't had tools to solve the problem for them. We're rolling Perforce out enterprise-wide, and trying to convince artists to start storing their working files in it (PSDs, etc) -- one of the big selling points is that you can easily see that someone else is working on this file before you jump in.
How is Sketch file support? When we've tried to share files via Dropbox it's constantly stepping on each others toes just when someone tries to open it for view-only. Makes collaboration difficult between a designer and a developer.
*Sketch files are actually folders with data, previews, etc. The act of opening the file actually modifies things like the thumbnail.
You are right that Sketch files (up till version 3.0.4) are actually file packages, but we support packages so it shows up as files online. This is the same as OmniGraffle and Keynote files which are actually folders. We have build our syncing technology to differentiate folders and package files.
Sketch just officially launched 3.1 two days ago which creates files that are actually single files. We can still support version control for these files, but we are working on fixing the preview generation for the new Sketch format.
"Sketch's file format has changed; documents are now truly single files and can be safely emailed or shared via Dropbox and other services without having to zip them up first"
Cool. It's been a while since I've used Photoshop on a regular basis, so I'm out of the loop. It just seemed odd given that psd is used directly underneath the icon.
