
Pixelmator 3.0 - sebkomianos
http://www.pixelmator.com/
======
mythz
Pixemlator is positively awesome, one of the highest quality + polished native
apps I've used, at insane value! It quickly became my primary graphics editor
of choice.

Though it's weird that I bought a copy years ago and am still getting free
upgrades? I'd happily pay for an upgrade again.

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devindotcom
I'm glad others like it, but I find it a massive pain every time I use it. A
million things seem the opposite way than they should be to me. I really,
really wish there were more all-purpose lightweight image editors on OS X so I
could get away from it. I suppose it's high time I gave Gimp another shot...

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demallien
Have you tried Acorn?

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devindotcom
I have not, at least not in a long time. I think last I tried it it was still
a little early so I ended up with Pixelmator. I'll give it another shot,
thanks for the reminder.

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gedrap
This is probably the most successful Lithuanian IT startup (which is still
based there, as far as I know). As a Lithuanian, I'm feeling really happy to
see how far and awesome they got!

~~~
antr
I've been using Pixelmator since they pushed it to the Mac App store, and all
this time I thought they where German... good to know I was wrong!

~~~
potatolicious
I've bought Pixelmator twice now. Once on the App Store and once before. $30
is IMO way too little to pay for an app of this quality.

Very happy to see Pixelmator continue to enjoy some well-deserved success.

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Ethan_Mick
I haven't downloaded v3 yet, but I love using Pixelmator for quick edits and
tweaks to images. It loads much faster on my MacBook Air than Photoshop, and
I've found the learning curve to be much lower too. All while having 80% of
the features from Photoshop; which for my basic needs is 98% of everything
I'll do.

Version 3 looks like a huge win for customers, really excited to be grabbing
the update for free from the App Store. Although honestly, I'd pay for it
again at this point.

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princess3000
Almost made this exact post... I was looking for a Photoshop clone for Mac and
stumbled on Pixelmator years ago, it's definitely not as full-featured as PS
but it's a fraction of the cost and it does what I need it to do 98% of the
time. For $30 it's a steal, especially if they're upgrading it like this.

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Samuel_Michon
36MB to download the full app. It takes up 66MB on my disk. Photoshop CC takes
up 1.1GB, that’s 20 times as much – quite a contrast.

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Cthulhu_
I wonder what takes up that much space in Photoshop. I suspect the brush
files, iirc those take up quite some space. I can imagine Pixelmator uses much
more native / vertex images, like those you can create using PaintCode [1],
which generates a bit of native Objective C code to produce the image you draw
in that app. Paintcode is a great way to reduce the size of your app's
downloaded content, btw.

[1] [http://www.paintcodeapp.com/](http://www.paintcodeapp.com/)

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nailer
Vectormator is awesome, but still can't export to either EPS or SVG.

I'm hoping they add it soon - SnapSVG, the Raphael replacement, supports
animating SVGs created in other apps: [http://snapsvg.io/](http://snapsvg.io/)

~~~
nikso
wow! I didn't know Pixelmator could do that. It's an instant buy for me! I've
been looking for a replacement to illustrator for a long time.

Please Pixelmator people give love to vector graphics!

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zack12
Can anybody spread some light on the business model they are trying to follow?
I know they sell software, but with a single software for $29 and few
employees. They need to sell quite a few licenses to make it.

I know its an ignorant statement, but can anybody explain it to me.

~~~
seanalltogether
I'm also curious how well this will work in the long run. Apple doesn't have a
good model for paid upgrades on the app store and so far they've refused to
implement anything to deal with it.

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danudey
They've made enough money at this point that they could just tell all their
developers to work on whatever they wanted and they'd still be well off in the
medium term.

Their next big product should be a good standalone vector engine app that
people can replace Illustrator with. That'd save a lot of designers I know
several hundred dollars a year. Especially with Adobe's cloud stuff getting
more and more mandatory…

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Geee
Wow, layer styles! This was the only major thing missing compared to
Photoshop. Everything else was already far better than Photoshop for my use.

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jasonkester
Did anybody else spend half a minute trying to interact with the "app", then
give up and close the tab, thinking it was broken before coming back here to
discover that it was just a full-page screenshot of a desktop app?

I'd never heard of Pixelmator, so I made the natural assumption from what came
up on screen that it was some form of web-based photoshop thing.

But it's not. And there's nothing but a screenshot above the fold. So it just
looks broken.

I wonder how many potential customers they're bouncing this way.

~~~
avree
This sort of negative commentary is always distasteful.

Any person who's used a computer in the last twenty years would understand
that the interface is not responding and try alternate input methods (like
scrolling, one of the most common paradigms on web pages.)

It doesn't "just look broken".

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jodi
It's not negative commentary. It is a legitimate user interface issue that
several people experienced. It is also super easy for them to fix.
Sometimes(always) when you launch a new product or design, you want feedback
on the silly little things you wouldn't have thought of that could potentially
turn people away. The attention span of cold clicks is measured in seconds.
Any silly issue can push someone to click off. I have used a computer
extensively for many years and thought it was a live demo for a few seconds.
As they say in web usability, don't make people think.

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avree
The dramatic hyperbole drives it from being "surfacing an issue" to negative
bashing.

"Did anybody else spend half a minute trying to interact with the "app", then
give up and close the tab, thinking it was broken before coming back here to
discover that it was just a full-page screenshot of a desktop app?"

xauronx, and the majority of the other folks explaining the issue, took a much
more reasonable approach—"it was a .5 second instinct to interact with it and
then I figured it out. Not sure if that constitutes a negative UI experience
or not, but it IS an issue. "

It's just unbelievable to think that anyone familiar with a web interface
would get so confused by the screenshot that their only recourse would be to
abandon ship.

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devx
It would be nice if they made it cross-platform, like on Linux/Windows and
even Android/iOS eventually. It might give Adobe a run for their money.

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TheCoreh
I doubt this will happen anytime soon. Pixelmator is heavily dependent on OSX-
specific tech, like core graphics. Porting it to other platforms would require
basically reimplementing all this functionality from scratch, making it
performant, and then recreating the entire UI.

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stephencanon
Indeed; ~half of the technologies listed in their splash image for the "New
Image Editing Engine" are Apple-specific: vImage, Accelerate framework, vDSP,
Core Animation, ColorSync, Core Image, ...

Some of these have rough equivalents on other platforms, but the interfaces
definitely don't line up exactly, so it wouldn't be completely straightforward
to shim them. Others simply don't have existing equivalents.

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thepumpkin1979
Wow, I just checked all the tutorial videos. I've never seen such delightful
Demos in my life, makes me want to buy the thing. I wonder how effective would
it be to create UI's for Mobile apps in Pixelmator, I'm donwloading the Trial.

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buzzkillr2
What a fantastic application! I wish more companies operated like the
Pixelmator Team

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vilius
Remember "Google buys Sparrow"? I wonder if we'll see "Adobe buys Pixelmator"
in the near future.

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Samuel_Michon
I’d rather it not be acquired, but if it were, I’d much rather that it be
acquired by Apple. That company doesn’t currently have a full-fledged image
editor in its software lineup and probably wouldn’t cancel or cripple the
product. As Adobe already ships several full-fledged image editing tools, I
don’t have much faith they would leave this product intact.

I use Adobe products for much of my day, but I still hate them for what they
did to GoLive CyberStudio.

~~~
yardie
Those 2 have an obsessive, abusive relationship. Adobe cancels Premiere for
the Mac, Apple releases Final Cut Pro. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has a
mole in Pixelmator who calls the Apple batphone if Adobe starts to sniff
around their office.

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Samuel_Michon
I do agree with you that Apple and Adobe have a strained relationship, it has
been so for decades. However, your example isn’t correct.

Apple bought Final Cut Pro from Macromedia in 1998 and released its first
version in 1999. At the time, Adobe had been releasing new versions of
Premiere for both Mac and PC for years, and the product only went Windows-only
in 2003 (when it renamed the product Premiere Pro.) In 2007, it started
releasing Premiere for both platforms again.

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antonyme
Looks like the v3 update still doesn't support NetPBM files (.pgm, .ppm, etc)
-
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm_format](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm_format)

A much earlier version did support this common file format, but for some
strange reason it was removed in 2.x.

A pgm/ppm file is a wonderfully simple format - it is basically a simple
textual header followed by a binary dump of the image data. So it is trivially
easy to parse and load or save. It is for this reason that it is so useful,
for example when working on image processing algorithms, it is so convenient
to export test data, intermediate results and so forth.

I hope they will (re-)add support for pgm/ppm files soon. If you think this
would be useful too, please vote on the support site.

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weiy
Looks nice, but no thanks. I think I will stick with GIMP (it's free!)

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erso
Note to Pixelmator folks:

    
    
      Turn good-looking pictures into spectacular.
    

Perhaps that should say:

    
    
      Turn good-looking pictures into spectacular images.
    

Or something.

~~~
delluminatus
Grammatically speaking, you might be best off with,

    
    
      Make good-looking pictures spectacular.
    

Or:

    
    
      Turn good-looking pictures into spectacular ones.
    

I think "good-looking pictures" is an awkward phrase that negatively affects
the whole sentence. Personally, I would go with:

    
    
      Turn a good image into a spectacular one
    

or, brevis:

    
    
      Make good images spectacular

~~~
MildlySerious
Or "Turn 'good looking' into 'spectacular'".

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atldev
I like the clever use of css-based animations on the marketing site. The
Invision feature tour
([http://www.invisionapp.com/tour](http://www.invisionapp.com/tour)) does a
great job of this as well. It probably goes unnoticed by the majority of
visitors, but I think it communicates great design and attention to detail in
a very subtle way. Hats off to the designers and marketing team that built a
great site to get the message out.

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crazygringo
Has anyone tried using this for web design? Any idea how it compares to
Photoshop in that regard?

(Obviously Photoshop is not great for web design, but it's still the de-facto
standard...)

~~~
apierre
I think Sketch would be more suitable for web design.

~~~
uptown
Is Sketch a suitable replacement for Illustrator? I've been trying to find the
right application to replace Illustrator for my very-infrequent needs which
can't justify Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription pricing.

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richbradshaw
We use Sketch + iDraw. Both are not Illustrator, but they deal well with the
vector stuff we need. (I'm a dev, not designer, so don't really know exactly
what's going on, but we migrated from PS + FW to these tools over a couple of
years).

~~~
ryantownsend
I also use this setup. Sometimes Sketch can be a little fiddly to get SVG
export working properly, so iDraw fills that niche nicely for me.

I'm glad to finally see Layer Styles in Pixelmator, for years this feature has
been preventing it from being comparable to Photoshop in the eyes of many. The
forum was full of people requesting it, the argument was they wanted to "get
it right" rather than rushing, which is valid, but it's not really any
different from Sketch or Photoshop, so I'm not sure that was really the truth
(maybe a Pixelmator dev could shine some light on that?), that said - it's
here now so no complaints :-) excellent work chaps & chapettes!

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shurcooL
Pixelmator is great (and I've bought it long ago), but I still have just one
simple feature request:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GwKIsQX...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GwKIsQXpSmsJ:support.pixelmator.com/viewtopic.php%3Ff%3D4%26t%3D8651+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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asolove
I really wanted to love Pixelmator but this update finally makes it usable for
me solely for baseline support in text.

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apunic
My first thought when on the iTunes web page of Pixelmator: "$29.99, wow this
is nothing for that many features"

My second thought when on the App Store Page of Pixelmator: "Update [for free
since I bought yrs ago Pixelmator]": WTF these guys are awesome

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todd3834
I am very impressed with this and for $30! Giving photoshop a run for their
money!

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kawera
Can it save 16-bit tifs? I've searched but didn't find any mention.

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kawera
I've found it in their forum. _We 'll have more to say about 16-bit support
later this year when the new Mac Pro is out._

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Schweigi
Nice!. I was glad when I found Pixelmator as an easy to use image tool on OSX
after working with Paint.Net on Windows.

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Sephiroth87
I was expecting a paid upgrade, and would have gladly paid because I love it,
but this is just great :D

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lukeholder
Between this and Sketch I think I am ready to never buy another copy of
Photoshop or Illustrator.

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electic
I wish the color selectors were better. The pallets need work imho. Otherwise,
love the update!

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tehwebguy
Anyone know how PSD read support has come along?

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quarterto
It was pretty much flawless as of 2.2.1, with the obvious exception of layer
styles.

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emehrkay
Layer styles are HUGE with photoshop work. Once they get that under control, I
wonder what else they'll need to make a dent, maybe some design maven to vouch
for the tool

I am downloading now. I've always loved the simplicity of the app, very Mac-
like

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killertypo
this is awesome, i wish I had a mac to make use of it. Are there any good
alternatives to this on windows?

