
Pixelmator Grosses $1 Million on the Mac App Store - shawndumas
http://www.pixelmator.com/weblog/2011/01/25/pixelmator-grosses-1-million-on-the-mac-app-store/#comments?r44b=no
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xutopia
I think the team deserves it. It's a solid alternative to Photoshop for those
who want to fiddle with image editing but don't want to pay hundreds of
dollars for the privilege.

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kellishaver
I agree, and good for them. It's a great little program. I use it in place of
Photoshop oh my relatively low-end Macbook for light image editing, just
because it performs so much faster.

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frou_dh
Pixelmator is "The Missing Editor" (to quote TextMate but even more applicable
here).

I thought one weakness of OS X was that it came with no built in image editor.
People mock MS Paint on Windows, but it's a lot better than nothing.

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pan69
That seems to be a very dangerous position to be in. There is nothing stopping
Apple from shipping OS X with a similar product. What if they do?

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glhaynes
It's happened lots of times before and will happen lots of times in the
future. On the other hand, now that the App Store is out, everybody that buys
Pixelmator sends 30% of $29.99 to Apple, so... :)

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pan69
I can totally see how this is a win-win for both parties. Hadn't thought of
that.

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glhaynes
If performance stays similar outside this 20 days ( _obviously_ not saying it
will), this app is an $18 million/year business for Pixelmator and a $7
million/year one for Apple.

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awolf
At $29 per copy and assuming by grossing they mean their share after apple
takes its 30% cut, that's 50,000 copies sold.

Amazing success!

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aonic
I would assume gross is before Apple's cut. Net would be post-Apple's cut

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glhaynes
I'd have assumed gross to mean "after Apple's cut" (since Pixelmator Team
doesn't ever see any of that revenue — their payment from Apple (thus, their
entire income) is only for the remaining 70%) whereas net would be gross minus
taxes and their other expenses. But I totally don't know.

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aonic
Yeah, maybe. I was thinking in terms of how PayPal works, but your way makes
sense too.

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m0nastic
This makes me very happy. I am in the overwhelming minority of professional
photographers who don't use Photoshop, but I have happily been using
Pixelmator since it launched.

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CognitiveLens
Depending on your photography style, you should definitely consider Aperture,
particularly now that it's so much cheaper through the App Store (US$80). I
used image-editing software for my photography for a long time, but I have
moved almost entirely to photo-dedicated apps like Aperture and Lightroom.

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m0nastic
I actually do use Aperture to import RAW's (I bounce between that and
Lightroom, but I find that Lightroom seems intentionally limited to entice you
to use Photoshop).

I don't really post-process my images; they're controlled studio setups
(mostly nude fine art). I also am not anti-Photoshop, if it turns out that at
some point I need to use it for something, I'll buy it (I'm just happy that
for the few years so far I've been doing work I haven't needed it).

I've used it in the past, just not since making a go as a photographer.

It's more that I was still using film for all of photography school, and doing
processing in the darkroom. Since switching over to digital a year ago, I
haven't really adjusted my process.

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ambirex
Nice sales reports, although I have to feel it has something to do with them
including the upcoming 2.0 release and no way for current users to upgrade to
the Mac App Store.

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ejwcom
Pixelmator is perfectly positioned, which wont be very common. A good solid
application, easier to incrementally learn and much cheaper than the primary
competitor.

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devindotcom
In my opinion this is more indicative of the lack of solid image editing apps
on OS X than any real quality on Pixelmator's part. I find the free tools
available on Windows (Paint.net is amazing) to be far more useful and
intuitive that Pixelmator , which I use only because it is marginally better
than the other options, and I don't really want to overdo things by installing
photoshop. Good for Pixelmator, though.

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_sebkom
Isn't anyone else curious about their figures before the Mac App Store?

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seanalltogether
I'm very happy for them, and very anxious that I'm on my 13th day now waiting
for a review from Apple for my own application.

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steve918
I gladly paid my $29, it's a nice app

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clyfe
Anyone knows where I can find a clean version of the picture that is on their
front page ?

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kefs
Wow.. Very impressive!. And it was actually 19 days, not 20. I'm crying a
little inside.

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nika
I stopped using pixelmator when they made it so that you can't edit photoshop
files without saving them in the pixelmator format. Further in my workflow I
have an app that will read photoshop but has never heard of pixelmator. So,
their forcing me to save my edits in their proprietary format makes the app a
pain to use.

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jacquesm
The default behavior for situations like that is to write the format you read
in the first place. Weird that they would choose to do this!

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jacobolus
Not that weird: they likely have features which cannot be saved in Photoshop
format, and users end up frustrated and confused if opening up a file results
in something different than was saved.

Being tied to another company’s proprietary and idiosyncratic file format
sounds like a terribly obnoxious burden for any piece of software: all the
effort in reverse engineering the format and so on never yields quite the
result you expect (Microsoft for example can’t even get their own formats
right from one release to another, and they have loads of cash to throw at the
problem), and any development time spent on it is time taken away from the
actual image-making features of the app.

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hexley
I'm pretty sure PSD is handled by QuickTime.

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jacobolus
If you only care about the features in 10-year-old versions of Photoshop, then
sure, that’s probably true.

