[HN Gopher] Apple acquires Pixelmator
___________________________________________________________________
Apple acquires Pixelmator
Author : dm
Score : 745 points
Date : 2024-11-01 15:36 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pixelmator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pixelmator.com)
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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)
| JimDabell wrote:
| 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?
| drcongo wrote:
| I'd actually like to see that happen I think. For my use
| cases Sketch is infinitely better than Figma. Figma is an
| abomination of an app.
| wmeredith wrote:
| I adore Sketch, but the industry standard has been Figma.
| It's a web app and it beats the pants of Sketch for
| collaboration.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Pixelmator was one of the apps that was extremely-tightly-
| integrated with Apple's APIs and ecosystem
|
| While I can understand that companies want to build cross
| platform applications, something like Pixelmator shows us what
| can be done if you take advantage for the platform you're
| targeting. We're not seeing that often enough anymore.
|
| The few other times I've seen code that truly uses the
| operating system and APIs it's mostly been server software.
| It's not unique to macOS either, Windows provide a ton of APIs
| as well.
| dagmx wrote:
| This is both simultaneously surprising (given how long they've
| been in the perfect space to acquire) and unsurprising (given
| that they're a perfect fit)
|
| Really looking forward to what comes out of this.
| spike021 wrote:
| Would be cool to see this slotted in as a more advanced photo
| editing product akin to Aperture back in the day.
|
| Apple still makes iMovie separately from Final Cut for video, so
| there's definitely a path there I think to doing something
| similar for photography.
| whartung wrote:
| At the same time, they don't really have anything like this in
| their portfolio in terms of Keynote/Pages/Numbers.
|
| They have some photo touch up ability in the Photo App, and
| maybe in preview. But nothing as first class as what Pixelmator
| is.
|
| There's a possibility for a new Paint app.
| al_borland wrote:
| I wonder if this is also their play to offer some options for
| generative AI, without necessarily going against their
| current statements related to Photos where they don't want to
| fundamentally change what a photograph is.
| extr wrote:
| Makes sense. I'm a pretty casual user of Pixelmator Pro but it
| really does feel like a first party Apple app.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| It does, and this makes me nervous that they'll screw it up.
| I'm a user of Apple Logic Pro and they've done a decent job of
| keeping it going for what, fifteen plus years? But I can't
| offhand think of any other popular acquisition that they've
| improved upon and the kept improving off the top of my head
| (I'm sure there's more that I'm not thinking of, maybe CUPS)
| without just sorta forgetting. At least there's still Acorn.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| The "Shortcuts" app was an acquisition and is fairly powerful
| as a graphical system automation app. I created a shortcut
| that looks up the overnight weather at my home, and
| determines if it needs to turn on the AC to run for ~30
| minutes before I go to bed so the room is comfortably cool.
| bangaroo wrote:
| apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while. aperture
| dying was a bummer, and final cut and logic feel simultaneously
| actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much
| buzz around them.
|
| it would be very neat if apple started to build the necessary
| portfolio of software to provide a viable, ideally not-
| subscription-based competitor to adobe's suite of products. they
| certainly have had the chops to be competitive in the creative
| space for a long time, so it feels like something they'd be well-
| positioned to seriously take on if they invested heavily in it.
|
| i haven't been as in touch with the video editing space as i was
| 2 decades ago when i worked in TV, but it feels like FCP is not
| the juggernaut it once was from the outside. my read may be
| wrong. similarly, logic doesn't feel as prominent in the music
| world anymore - i really rarely see musicians using it these
| days, though again that may just be my bias in the kinds of folks
| i pay attention to. would be cool to see the apple pro suite
| really regain its mojo and shake things up.
| vr46 wrote:
| 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 apps
| again, but stick with it, the future looks bright.
|
| I cannot imagine Apple ever competing with Capture One or most
| of the other circle of RAW image processors, which have some
| rather niche features, but they might be able to take on
| Lightroom.
| jwells89 wrote:
| The no-subscription aspect is a huge differentiator IMO, and
| depending on situation is even worth trading off features.
| Losing access to your work because you stopped your Adobe
| subscription sucks, as does the eventual premium over single-
| purchase.
| hggigg wrote:
| Yeah this. Aperture was a mess. Some of the "full" edit tools
| from Aperture are actually lurking in Photos which is a
| fairly competent photo editor on macOS surprisingly.
|
| I think they have a chance. I know a couple of professional
| photographers. One uses Capture One and only for tethering
| support. The other an ancient copy of Lightroom that was a
| one time purchase and use that for persistent contract work
| for one of the larger advertising companies in London. If the
| price is right and it's good enough, they are probably going
| to do fine.
|
| I'm an amateur and I want to get off LR because I hate giving
| Adobe money every month and the damn thing is a fat pig
| compared to Photomator. Photomator is missing decent dehaze
| and because I have a shitty little DX mirrorless, I need the
| denoise and it's not as good as LR is.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I was quite surprised (pleasantly) with the editing
| features available in Photos. I rarely use it on the
| desktop, and primarily only use it on the device I took the
| image, but to see how much more in depth the editing was on
| desktop was one of those that I thought for a second might
| make me switch to using it for device captured image
| editing.
|
| For non-device camera images, I still use full tilt apps as
| that's just my workflow and I do not ever see Photos
| working its way into that workflow
| hggigg wrote:
| Yeah I'm currently using lightroom for my mirrorless. I
| export that to photos then share / keep the flattened
| images in there.
| tigeroil wrote:
| Logic is a weird one. It has really truly excellent included
| instruments (such as Alchemy) and effects, but the app itself
| feels rather outdated. The mixer, whilst having had some nice
| features added since Logic 9, is in dire need of an update.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Wouldn't that be a sign of a product that was purchased by
| Apple and then left to languish as is with just enough
| effort to not let it rot?
| selectodude wrote:
| Apple bought Logic over 20 years ago. I'd be surprised if
| it shared any code with the pre-acquisition version.
| srockets wrote:
| Why not? Current macOS ships code older than that.
| cesaref wrote:
| I believe the Logic team are still based in Germany,
| where the original Emagic team that produced Logic were
| based, so it's not that they are languishing, but an
| intentional decision has been made (either by them or
| Apple) to keep this structure.
|
| Logic has such a long history, it's not surprising that
| it shows it's age, and has 'weird' behaviour that you
| wouldn't choose today. It's got stuff in there from the
| early 90s, as it started out as a midi sequencer before
| pulling audio into the product.
| butterknife wrote:
| 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.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| Logic Pro has both of those features:
| https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/edit-fades-
| lgcpf7c0...
| https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/snap-edits-to-
| zero-...
| FelipeCortez wrote:
| it doesn't? I never heard pops when trimming clips
| vr46 wrote:
| 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 all rough playing, bum notes and
| general incompetence are my own.
|
| Drums and Bass by Logic AI:
| https://www.mixcloud.com/hnvr46/demo-rvg/
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's astonishing. The best I've ever heard? No.
| Completely freaking serviceable, especially for a demo?
| Oh yeah.
| vr46 wrote:
| I know, it's nuts!
| Applejinx wrote:
| 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?
| newsclues wrote:
| Pros hate UI redesigns
| pantulis wrote:
| Pedantic note: Alchemy itself was brought in by Apple's
| acquisition of Camel Audio. So not Apple acquisitions go
| wrong.
| AlanYx wrote:
| 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.
| grahamj wrote:
| omg thanks for the tip! It seems to support iCloud-synched
| smart albums which is a key feature I've wanted for years
| since Aperture.
| jitl wrote:
| Amazing, this looks like just what I've been wanting
| vr46 wrote:
| 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
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Wow, can't believe I didn't find this while looking for
| Lightroom alternatives several months ago. Looks great!
| holman wrote:
| > FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.
|
| I'm more of a casual when it comes to Final Cut Pro rather
| than a daily driver, but it does seem like the last year or
| two they've started to get back into the fight again. Some of
| the 360 VR/AI/multi-iOS camera changes seem to go more hand-
| in-hand with "Apple gives a shit about content creation
| again", buttressed by Apple Vision Pro and spatial
| photography.
|
| As someone who's still eagerly awaiting like... any
| reasonable prosumer device to shoot for Apple Vision Pro, I
| think all of this industry is going to really ramp up in the
| next few short years very quickly. Gonna be interesting.
| gannonburgett wrote:
| Yea, if Apple is going to want their VR products to succeed
| they're going to have to rely heavily on some vertical
| integration on video capture/editing software, and FCPX
| (and now Pixelmator for the spatial photography efforts)
| seems like the natural place to put those efforts.
| grogenaut wrote:
| At this point for video I'm just using DaVinci Resolve which
| is free except for 8k work and works on windows/mac/linux.
| segasaturn wrote:
| >suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my
| Photojournalism classmates fell victim to
|
| How does that happen? Forgetting to periodically save their
| work and have the app crash, or was it saving incorrectly and
| producing corrupted files?
| vr46 wrote:
| Going back to 2007, so can't remember super clearly, but
| IIRC the db was a sqlite like thing and all info about
| everything was stored in this, and it was vulnerable to
| corruption, plus all versions and thumbnails were mixed
| together with original image files - a total mess. The
| digital photo management landscape wasn't so mature then,
| and some people trusted Aperture with their original images
| whereas later versions allowed or encouraged people to keep
| their "masters" elsewhere.
|
| Because the whole thing was as slow as a slug dragging a
| ball-and-chain, pre-SSD, issues with that filesystem or
| master database were sometimes mistaken for just general
| slowness. I jumped to Lightroom faster than you could say
| Gordon Parks.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Aperture 1.0 was very slow. The stories I could tell
| about its genesis...
|
| I came on board just before 1.0 release, and for 1.5 we
| cleaned things up a bit. For 2.0 we (mainly I) completely
| rewrote the database code, and got between 10x and 100x
| improvements by using SQLite directly rather than going
| through CoreData. CoreData has since improved, but it was
| a nascent technology itself back then, and not suited to
| the sort of database use we needed.
|
| The SQLite database wasn't "vulnerable to corruption",
| SQLite has several articles about its excellent ACID
| nature. The design of the application was flawed at the
| beginning though, with bindings used frequently in the UI
| to managed objects persisted in the database, which meant
| (amongst other things) that:
|
| - User changes a slider
|
| - Change is propagated through bindings
|
| - CoreData picks up the binding and syncs it to disk
|
| - But the database is on another thread, which
| invalidates the ManagedObjectContext
|
| - Which means the context has to re-read everything from
| the database
|
| - Which takes time
|
| - By now the user has moved the slider again.
|
| So: slow. I fixed that - see the other post I made.
| vr46 wrote:
| Thanks for the lovely insight, super interesting - I
| don't think I made it to Aperture 2 - but sounds like
| some unusual decisions made in that editing process. I
| suspect, based on my own history with disk problems, that
| the filesystem issues that would regularly pop up and not
| dealt with by your average technically-over-trusting
| student were the root cause, but exacerbated by the
| choices of image management and application speed.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Aperture was utterly paranoid about data-loss.
|
| There was the SQLite database that was run on its own
| thread, and regularly synced to disk, the hard-sync that
| waited until the data had flushed through to the disk
| platters.
|
| In addition to that there was a whole structure of plist
| files, one per image, that meant the database could be
| reconstructed from all these individual files, so if
| something _had_ somehow corrupted the SQLite database, it
| could be rebuilt. There was an option to do that in the
| menu or settings, I forget which. The plists were write-
| once, so they couldn 't be corrupted by the app after
| they'd been written-and-verified on ingest.
|
| Finally, there were archives you could make which would
| back up the database (and plist files) to another location.
| This wasn't automated (like Time Machine is) but you could
| set it running overnight and come back to a verified-and-
| known-good restore-point.
|
| If there was a catastrophic data loss, it's (IMHO much)
| more likely there was a disk failure than anything in the
| application itself causing problems - and unless you only
| ever had one instance of your data, and further that the
| disk problem was across both the platter-area that stored
| plists and well as database, it ought to have been
| recoverable.
|
| Source: I wrote the database code for Aperture. I tested it
| with various databases holding up to 1M photos on a nightly
| basis, with scripts that randomly corrupted parts of the
| database, did a rebuild, and compared the rebuilt with a
| known-good db. We regarded the database as a cache, and the
| plists as "truth"
|
| I'm not saying it was impossible that it was a bug in
| Aperture - it was a very big program, but we ran a _lot_ of
| tests on that thing, we were very aware that people are
| highly attached to their photos, and we also knew that when
| you have millions of users, even a 1-in-a-million corner-
| case problem can be a really big issue - no-one wanted to
| read "Aperture lost all my photos", ever.
| vr46 wrote:
| Again, thanks for the interesting insights.
|
| I personally witnessed one incident I mentioned, and for
| my sins tried to help my panicking classmate, I think we
| reached a good-enough outcome. On the subject of raw
| files processing, I have yet to find an ideal system, if
| it is even possible, where edits to get a RAW photo to
| its final state are handled and stored in some
| deterministic format, yet somehow connected to said
| image, in a way that allows the combination of the edit
| and raw to travel around.
|
| Everything I've tried - let's see, Aperture, Lightroom,
| Capture One - have to use some kind of library or
| database and there's no great way of managing the whole
| show. The edits ARE the final image and the only solution
| I had that ever works was to maintain a Mac Pro with RAID
| and an old copy of Lightroom, and run all images through
| that.
|
| IIRC, I never understood the Aperture filesystem,
| probably not meant for humans, which didn't help. Does
| that sound right?
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Adobe have (had?) a DNG file-format that encompasses the
| RAW data, JPEGs and the changes, but by the simple fact
| that adjustments are application-specific anything you do
| to modify the image won't be portable. It's basically a
| TIFF file with specific tags for photography.
|
| The thing is, if you want any sort of history, or even
| just adequate performance, you want a database backing
| the application - it's not feasible to open and decode a
| TIFF file every time you want to view a file, or scan
| through versions, or do searches based on metadata, or
| ... It's just too much to do, compared to doing a SQL
| query.
|
| The Aperture Library _was_ just a directory, but we made
| it a filesystem-type as a sort of hint not to go fiddling
| around inside it. If you right-clicked on it, you could
| still open it up and see something like <1>
|
| Masters were in the 'Masters' folder, previews (JPEGs)
| inside the 'Previews' folder, Thumbnails (small previews)
| were in the 'Thumbnails' folder. Versions (being a
| database object) had their own 'Versions' folder inside
| the 'Database' folder. This was where we had a plist per
| master + a plist per version describing what had been
| done to the master to make the version.
|
| We didn't want people spelunking around inside but it was
| all fairly logically laid out. Masters could later be
| referenced from places outside the Library (with a lower
| certainty of actually being available) but they'd still
| have all their metadata/previews/thumbnails etc inside
| the Library folder.
|
| 1: https://imgur.com/a/disk-structure-within-aperture-
| library-m...
| vr46 wrote:
| Yeah, even DNGs don't really work because as you say, the
| edits are application specific. My entire workflow
| converted everything to DNG for about 15 years but now I
| don't bother.
|
| The thing that Lightroom really got right was not trying
| to mix all this stuff and organizing the master files
| well, so it was extremely clear where source material
| lived. I certainly don't want to root around thumbnails
| and previews in randomly-named folders.
|
| Aperture's interface could have been great with some
| decent performance, and some of those decisions seemed to
| have survived with the iPhoto Library. Perhaps one big-
| ass ball of mud works fine for consumers with small file
| sizes and no archival strategy, but it's too prescriptive
| for me. If they brought Aperture back, and incorporated
| Photoshop-like features, that would be interesting and
| cool, so long as they left photo management alone.
|
| The lesson I took a long time to learn was to not have
| the RAW processor import your files and instead get Photo
| Mechanic to do it instead, because it does a better job,
| and just use the RAW processor to process RAWs.
|
| XMP/ITPC has been around longer than I've had a digital
| camera, do you know why Aperture didn't make use of
| those?
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| The abandoning of FCPX after surviving the reputation blow it
| took during the transition from 7->X is baffling to me. In the
| mid 2010s it was actually a fantastic NLE, I used it for
| professional work for a solid decade. When it comes to speed
| editing there's just nothing like it. But starting around 2019
| or 2020 they just began to let it languish. To say they don't
| have feature parity with resolve and premiere is beyond an
| understatement, whereas they were trailblazing some great stuff
| previously. Their multi-cam and audio sync'ing was next to none
| at one time.
| throwaway-11-1 wrote:
| I was around there ~2019 the original FCPX design team was
| purged when the art director from a print magazine took over
| for the pro apps. He brought in people worked on stuff like
| the LinkedIn website, ESPN baseball apps and Disney games.
| Engineers and QA were annoyed having to explain concepts like
| timecode
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Well that certainly explains things lol
| WillAdams wrote:
| Still sad that the Apple-award-winning vector drawing program
| Lineform all-but vanished. (and don't get me started on
| Freehand being bought by Adobe which is why I need to find a
| replacement vector drawing tool)
|
| Cenon is nice, but hasn't seen much updating (but at least,
| being opensource gets updated as new versions are released).
|
| Inkscape is workable, but still a bit awkward (and I doubt it
| will ever get all of Freehand's functionality/keyboard
| shortcuts).
|
| I've been buying Serif's Affinity Designer (and their other
| apps), but they're still not as comfortable as FH/MX --- wish
| the Quasado/GraviT folks would get further along.
| detourdog wrote:
| I use Cenon for my CAM. I didn't realize it was open source
| and I never expected to hear anyone else mention it.
| WillAdams wrote:
| It's only the drawing portion which is:
|
| https://cenon.info/
|
| FWIW, I tried very hard to find every possible CAD/CAM
| program when researching the Shapeoko wiki.... though I
| found Cenon because I was a long-time NeXT user.
| waffletower wrote:
| Logic is still solid, they even added audio stem decomposition
| in Logic Pro 11 recently.
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| that is a very fun feature - reminds me of the excitement I
| used to have with new versions of software...
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Apple gained _so much_ professional mindshare in the early
| 2000s with FCP, Shake, Logic, Aperture, Motion, XSan, XServe,
| etc. I worked in a graphics /media studio at the time, and the
| excitement was palpable. And creating things with those apps
| was just _fun_.
|
| It feels like a shame that only vestiges of that time remain
| today. The bar is much higher in some ways (lower in others),
| it takes a lot more skill and specialized knowledge to compete,
| and almost all vendors don't put in the same careful attention
| to detail (especially UX) that the Apple pro apps of that era
| had.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It seems there was a huge loss of software in the
| 32bit->64bit switch. Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to
| switch to Swift (or whatever the specific languages were).
| FCPX is such a different version than FCP. Just like
| QTPlayerX is so different than QT Player 7 Pro was such a
| regression of capabilities. I doubt there was a "this is the
| best QT Player we've ever released" on that "upgrade".
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift
|
| C#, not Cocoa. Cocoa is an API. You can write a Cocoa
| application in Swift, if you really want to (but you should
| really use SwiftUI for anything new)
| bangaroo wrote:
| not to well actually you, but i assume you meant
| objective c? c# is a microsoft thing.
| comboy wrote:
| Logic is stellar. Why would you feel like its being abandoned?
| Professional tools don't change UX every 2 years.
| bangaroo wrote:
| Apple is clearly investing in it, but for whatever reason
| it's simply not got the foothold it once had and they don't
| seem super interested in pushing it and people aren't using
| it. I feel like it's substantially less prominent in the
| industry than it was a decade or two ago, I see it in far
| fewer studios (or, even further I'll say I literally have not
| seen anyone using it in person in the past ten years, which
| is a marked change.) For a very long time, I feel like
| cubase/logic/pro tools were The DAWs That People Used. Logic
| doesn't seem to be appealing to new producers as much and it
| doesn't seem like Apple is as invested in pushing or
| promoting it as it used to be. I might be wrong, though!
|
| I much more frequently see Ableton for folks doing electronic
| music now (that really eats up most of the dance music space,
| as far as I can tell) with pro tools being the juggernaut in
| the live recording space. That said, I'm like... a hobbyist
| audio engineer who records and mixes friend's bands, so it's
| not like I'm in and out of studios all the time and there's
| tons I haven't seen. It's just anecdotal.
| changing1999 wrote:
| Logic falls into a weird space between pro (studio) software
| and home studio software. Professional studios mostly use Pro
| Tools and Cubase (Europe). Home users mostly migrated to
| Live. It's obviously an oversimplification but it does
| reflect the problem Logic is facing.
|
| Live is far ahead of Logic in the electronic music space.
| With a streamlined UI and M4L it dominated the market for the
| new(ish) generation of musicians. Every single musician I
| know (100s) moved from Logic to Live within the last two
| decades. The only people I know who still use Logic are
| composers (Live lacks music notation) using laptops at home.
|
| Not to say that Logic is not a great piece of software.
| Drummer tracks were revolutionary, built in plugins are
| solid.
| Applejinx wrote:
| There's some other places that migrated to Reaper because
| of its own specialties. Reaper runs great and is absurdly,
| unreasonably customizable.
|
| That of course means extensive skinning capabilities, but
| it also means ReaScript, a scripting language with a whole
| API. I recently succeeded in using ReaScript to take my
| control surface, the faders of which I'd colorcoded, and
| using them to on the fly adjust output level controls on
| plugins I wrote.
|
| Not just 'assign the plugins to a fader', or 'assign
| controls to plugin parameters on the selected track, or
| discontinuous selections of tracks', though those are also
| things Reaper happily does.
|
| I mean, in a big mix I can assign track colors to the
| tracks in Reaper, and the parameters (in plugins, mind you,
| anywhere in the FX stacks) will all jump to the live
| position of the control surface fader with that color. A
| bit specific and personal, but it's entirely done in
| scripting.
|
| The game industry uses Reaper for similar reasons: being
| able to automate generation of a game's entire collection
| of sounds has its uses. I would say it is the DAW
| equivalent of what Blender is, in 3D modeling.
| fny wrote:
| My guess is that this a purchase of what will become the ever
| missing "MS Paint."
|
| It's kinda wild that macOS bundles Garage Band but doesn't come
| with anything for graphics.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed
| and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them.
|
| They're _professional tools_. For use by people who are paid to
| use them. You don 't want there to be buzz, you want them to
| just work.
|
| Buzz is a godawful metric for useful software.
| crazygringo wrote:
| To the contrary, you want there to be buzz around their new
| features. As a professional, you need to keep up, and you
| want new features to reduce your busywork in the app.
|
| Buzz is actually a pretty good metric, because it means the
| product is being maintained and improved, and you want to be
| investing in tools that will continue to meet your needs over
| the next 10 years rather than become stagnant, and then you
| have to re-train on a competitor.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I suppose we need to be more specific about what we mean by
| buzz.
|
| I mean "buzz" to be a general enthusiasm about the software
| even among non-users. I recall times when there was quite a
| lot of this kind of buzz about both Logic and Final Cut, in
| part I think because they were a part of Apple's Mac OS X
| comeback story.
|
| I suspect you mean "buzz" to be enthusiasm in the community
| of users of the tools. I know software I've worked on in
| the pass, the general public couldn't care less about our
| product, but new releases always got a lot of buzz in our
| forums. This kind of buzz might actually be a pretty good
| metric.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I dunno, I'd be more inclined to subscribe to a version of
| Photoshop CS1/CS2 that runs on modern operating systems
| where all development effort goes into fixing bugs and
| improving performance instead of something like current
| Photoshop CC, where the focus is on gee-whiz gimmicky
| features. Plugins can fill in for the gee-whiz stuff
| without turning the core app into a cosmically bloated
| mess.
| bangaroo wrote:
| people who work in jobs tend to talk about their tools. i
| worked in tv for a while a couple decades back, i went to
| school for film, and thus i have many friends who do creative
| video editing and professional video editing and still follow
| the industry closely. i'm not talking about typical social
| media buzz, i'm talking about "companies moving on to the
| product" or even "companies continuing to use the product,"
| or professionals choosing to invest in the tool for their
| work.
|
| i've only seen businesses and creatives i know moving their
| workflows away from FCP and Logic. i've not talked to friends
| in the industry who are moving on to them. buzz may be a poor
| word to choose, but for example i have a friend who does a
| lot of in-house editing for a massive, national company that
| owns many local TV stations and they're moving from avid to
| _premiere_, of all things, which really feels shocking given
| that premiere for a long time felt like the hobbyist tool.
|
| a good example of a tool that has industry buzz lately is
| davinci resolve, which has had a meteoric rise in prominence.
| i don't think that it's the same thing as the average person
| talking around the water cooler but more and more of my
| friends who work at networks or in production are starting to
| use resolve in their color and editing workflows, and it's a
| topic of discussion.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| My mistake then, I thought you meant a more general social
| media kind of buzz.
|
| Logic and Final Cut did at one point have that kind of buzz
| when they were a part of Apple's "wow look at all the pros
| using macs" Mac OS X comeback story.
| bangaroo wrote:
| one hundred percent - and i felt like when they initially
| launched garageband they were doing a great play to get
| people (particularly folks who dabble and school kids)
| invested in the logic-style workflow to build up their
| familiarity so that folks entering the industry would
| demand it in their workplaces... and then it all just
| fell off. they actually seemed to want to have that kind
| of flow in place for basically every kind of professional
| tool! imovie->FCP and garageband->logic being the prime
| examples (or maybe only, I guess) that I can think of.
|
| I assume there was some shift in how they thought about
| serving professionals and where apple's place in the work
| ecosystem was because the beginning of the end for apple
| pro software in terms of prominence aligned roughly, it
| seems, with things like the discontinuation of the xserve
| line (which itself wound down as apple seemed to rebrand
| itself as a consumer device company first on the heels of
| the iPhone's success.)
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| > ideally not-subscription-based competitor
|
| What I think would probably be a more likely thing to happen is
| for Apple to create a subscription called "Apple Creative" or
| sth. as soon as they have a similar assortment of programs to
| rival Adobe as having one subscription for all of their
| applications is currently their biggest advantage.
| rty32 wrote:
| > it feels like something they'd be well-positioned to
| seriously take on if they invested heavily in it.
|
| I agree, but history just proved that Apple does not care.
|
| And let's be real: Photoshop is cross-platform, and lots of
| content creation software is cross platform (or a web app).
| There are many more content creators that use Windows than
| people here are aware of or want to acknowledge (on HN,
| sometimes you get the impression that Windows is a forgotten OS
| that nobody uses). Now, Apple is at a huge disadvantage for
| losing that market -- often you can only be a big player if you
| have enough users. Apple also is never known for putting apps
| on the web like Figma and doesn't appear to have plan to do so.
|
| A similar example is the iWork suite. It exists, but neither
| users nor Apple seem to care about it.
|
| In the end, they just kind of development native Mac OS
| software half-mindedly. Which is fine -- that's what they want
| to do.
| mxey wrote:
| > A similar example is the iWork suite. It exists, but
| neither users nor Apple seem to care about it.
|
| I would disagree on that, at least about Keynote. I'm not the
| only one who loves it.
| robenkleene wrote:
| It's weird seeing all this discussion of this being a new entry
| into Apple's pro apps, I'm curious what you folks think Apple
| has to gain from expanding their pro line up today?
|
| Apple was into pro apps 20 years ago when they were trying to
| win over creatives to their new platform (OS X). That's hasn't
| been a priority for them since then, they've vaguely migrated
| to the prosumer market (Final Cut Pro X). But that strikes me
| more as a compromise to give the products more life without
| doing things that are antithetical to Apple (mainly backwards
| compatible, i.e., real pros need this).
|
| I've speculated here that my only guess is this is about
| visionOS (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42018695), but
| curious to hear from anyone what specific problem expanding
| their pro line up solves beyond that? (I guess maybe getting
| another pro app on iPad is a little bit of something, but I
| don't think that's acquisition worthy.)
| chongli wrote:
| _apple 's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while_
|
| I blame it on Apple's corporate culture and its relentless
| focus on secrecy and big event announcements. This strategy
| works extremely well for them in the consumer space but it's
| just frustrating for pros to deal with. When professionals
| invest in a software tool for their business they need to have
| some assurance of commitment from the software vendor. It takes
| an enormous amount of time and effort to retrain for new tools
| and retool for new workflows.
|
| Pros really like when a company that makes their tools is
| really open about the development roadmap and engaged in two-
| way conversations about issues with the tools and what needs to
| be fixed, what new features are needed, etc. Apple has
| traditionally been seen to be hostile to that sort of
| relationship.
| duped wrote:
| fwiw, you're forgetting Mainstage, which is the defacto
| industry standard (alongside Ableton, to an extent) for live
| performance. There's a cottage industry of Mainstage session
| sales and sound design that is funded by basically every
| theater production in the United States from high school to
| Broadway which is wild if you think about it.
|
| Garageband is also way more popular than people realize. Logic,
| (which is Garageband+ since version 10, essentially) has a few
| features that anyone in that ecosystem really wants. Logic +
| Mainstage is still unbeaten for the value for
| recording/production/performance, while Ableton continues to
| rot and Bitwig gets slightly better (but is still no Logic, and
| costs 3x more for fewer features)
|
| Final Cut had its lunch eaten by DaVinci and Premiere. And
| anyone with money was/is using Avid still, just like with Pro
| Tools.
| runjake wrote:
| This is in no way a criticism of the news, but if Pixelmator
| isn't for you, consider trying Acorn, developed by the reputable
| indie developer Gus Mueller:
|
| https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
|
| It aligns better with my concept of an image editor, based on my
| experience with Photoshop 4.x-6.x and The Gimp.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Thanks! Pixelmator just didn't click for me. Hotkeys were
| different and it felt like it operated slightly differently
| from old school Photoshop.
| tgv wrote:
| I got both when they were very cheap, and I stuck with
| Pixelmator. It felt best for me. But ... I'm a casual user. No
| clever or subtle edits.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Gus has personally responded to every bit of feedback I've
| submitted, with quick turnaround for bug fixes and thoughtful
| engagement with suggestions.
|
| Acorn strikes the right balance for me of simplicity vs
| richness of features.
| toinbis wrote:
| 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!
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Nice change of pace from the current zeitgeist of, "you should
| really be Extremely Online to have a chance!" that is oft-
| repeated by...Extremely Online people.
| kermatt wrote:
| > "Our marketing strategy is to just focus on the product".
|
| I wish more companies had this perspective, in contrast to the
| "Barely MVP and mostly marketing spend" to get the most signups
| / MAU in hopes of an acquisition.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| People tend to forget that product is one of the Ps
|
| Marketing is not the same as promotion
| wslh wrote:
| Time and patience pays when you have a great product.
| SSLy wrote:
| Whoa, nice. I've purchased Photomator while it was just a couple
| of euros.
| segasaturn wrote:
| I love Pixelmator Pro, especially because of no subscription fee.
| If you own Pro for more than 4 months you're spending less money
| than you would on Photoshop!
| minimaxir wrote:
| They had switched their Photomator spinoff to subscription
| pricing in 2022:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/wrieaa/pixelmator_ph...
|
| It's within the realm of possibility that a relaunched version
| of Pixelmator Pro could have subscription pricing as Apple has
| been playing with that with Logic Pro on iPad:
| https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro-ipad/start-a-logic-...
| kstrauser wrote:
| It's the sweet spot for me. I don't edit images for a living,
| but I push pixels around enough for hobbies (e.g. making video
| game maps) that I want something user friendly and pleasant.
| Pixelmator Pro has way more features than I'll ever need or
| use, and all the ones I _do_ need are ergonomic to me, a person
| who doesn 't have decades of Photoshop muscle memory.
| ModernMech wrote:
| This is the market GIMP needed to fill but doesn't. It's
| definitely capable but it's never been "friendly and
| pleasant" to my eye.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Paint.NET fills that market also, but it's Windows-only
| shareware.
| vunderba wrote:
| Krita feels like GIMP done right to me,
| prmoustache wrote:
| I am using both[1] and I never understood these kind of
| comments. Their UI is so similar.
|
| [1] Krita more as paint tool on my Lenovo Yoga, Gimp more
| as an editing tool on other computers.
| kstrauser wrote:
| As long as there continue to be tutorials for how to draw
| a circle in GIMP, they will not seem alike to me.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I used GIMP for years and years before Pixelmator came
| around, and the first time I tried Pixelmator was the last
| time I used GIMP.
|
| As others here mentioned, Krita is also much nicer. If
| Pixelmator didn't exist it's probably what I'd use instead.
| pier25 wrote:
| 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).
| talldayo wrote:
| > Adobe must be trembling.
|
| Adobe is probably popping open a champagne for every cross-
| platform Creative Cloud competitor that gets mothballed with
| Apple's capital. If Microsoft acquired Affinity next, the Adobe
| offices would look like a disco ball for a week.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I've never seen a graphics person using a windows machine in
| all my years in tech...
|
| Maybe I'm in some sort of bubble.
| talldayo wrote:
| I guess it depends where you work. In CAD and 3D animation
| work, Windows machines outnumber the Macs I see 10:1. In
| smaller shops this ratio probably flips around but Adobe
| (and others) have a large and captive contingent of Windows
| users to profit off.
| pier25 wrote:
| Adobe doesn't offer CAD and 3D animation products.
| talldayo wrote:
| [(and others)]
| racl101 wrote:
| I have but it was corporate, fintech setting where Windows
| stations rule the place. She was a really good graphics
| designer too. Surprised me as well.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I've been forced to use Windows in the creative graphics
| world. Back long ago in the dark ages, I did
| layout/graphics for a 'zine that was all done on Windows NT
| with Adobe software delivered to press on a Syquest disk.
|
| More recently (2017ish), I was on Windows 7 for another
| stint at graphics.
|
| Maybe I've just had the misfortune that others have been
| able to avoid??
| ihateolives wrote:
| Yes you are. You probably live in the US, Canada or the UK.
| hifromwork wrote:
| We all live in our own bubbles. I never saw a tech person
| using MacOS, it's always Windows or Linux - I assume that's
| not your experience either (and I only know a few people
| using MacOS privately). That probably mostly depends on the
| country one resides in.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| "graphics people" aren't the core people using Adobe's
| products though. As evidenced by the terrible designs
| people keep cranking out using photoshop. And by the huge
| market for terrible-design-by-numbers Canva.com
| fortran77 wrote:
| Really? I worked in Hollywood for many years and all the
| color grading and photo editing was done on PCs with Sony
| professional color grading monitors, which weren't
| supported right on Macs.
| pier25 wrote:
| Pixelmator could never compete with Adobe. Their expertise is
| on Mac and until now they didn't have the resources to make a
| big product like Photoshop or Illustrator (at some point they
| shared the idea of making a vector graphics product but it
| was abandoned).
|
| Another point is macOS has a significant market share in the
| creative industries. Personally I know zero
| designers/illustrators using Windows. My hunch is Mac users
| represent probably 50% or more of Adobe users.
| fny wrote:
| What if it becomes another iMovie or Garageband?
| themagician wrote:
| Affinity was acquired by Canva.
| nacs wrote:
| Yep, I wish Apple had acquired them instead. Canva is.. not
| a good company.
| fratlas wrote:
| Canva left the buy once affinity model untouched, and are
| an ethical company.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't think Apple bought this to mothball it. That only
| makes sense if it competes with your own products. Which this
| doesn't.
| echoangle wrote:
| I think the point was that cross-platform is mothballed
| now, there probably won't be a windows version of
| pixelmator now.
| groby_b wrote:
| There never was going to be one. The pixelmator team is
| _deeply_ steeped in the Apple world, and I seriously
| doubt they 'd ever consider Windows.
| latexr wrote:
| > If Microsoft acquired Affinity next
|
| They have already been acquired (by Canva) earlier this year.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39824191
| startupLankan wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| You can't polish a turd, Beavis.
| wmeredith wrote:
| 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.
| hbosch wrote:
| Weird, because the overlap between After Effects and Resolve is
| insignificantly small. Anyone using AE for post-processing only
| has been in the wrong app for years already.
| pier25 wrote:
| plenty of people doing motion graphics with Resolve
|
| and now Rive is really taking the 2D world by storm
| hbosch wrote:
| I would be shocked if Rive had even 1% of the DAU that
| After Effects does.
| pier25 wrote:
| I agree but it's getting better every day and the growth
| has been phenomenal. Just look at the number of tutorials
| on youtube etc.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Do you have a source for folks doing motion graphics with
| Resolve? Always curious to hear more data points on this.
| The impression I have from reading online is I'd be shocked
| if they had over 1% of the market, but it's purely
| anecdotal.
| pier25 wrote:
| Sorry no data points, just what I've seen first hand.
|
| Everyone around me has moved on from Premiere and Final
| Cut to Resolve.
|
| AE is objectively a more powerful solution for motion
| graphics than Fusion. But OTOH it's super convenient to
| have it all in a single app and for many projects
| (probably most video projects) you don't need more than
| Fusion.
| robenkleene wrote:
| If you don't mind sharing I'd love to hear which industry
| you're in. What I typically hear is advertising is
| Premiere, Hollywood is Avid, and Resolve is taking over
| prosumer/smaller shops (although still AE for any
| remotely sophisticated motion graphics/2D work). And Nuke
| for VFX compositing. I've actually never heard of Fussion
| itself being being popular for anything actually, it
| seems like it's not sophisticated enough to compete with
| Nuke, and not a great fit for the motion graphics/2D
| stuff that AE excels at.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Some people may not be familiar with the fact that
| BlackMagic Design incorporated its motion graphics and VFX
| package, Fusion, into Resolve a few years ago. It's an
| incredibly powerful compositing package, though its node-
| based architecture may present a nontrivial learning curve
| for people accustomed to the pre-comping workflow of AE.
| robenkleene wrote:
| > node-based architecture may present a nontrivial
| learning curve for people accustomed to the pre-comping
| workflow of AE.
|
| I'd also emphasize that node-based compositing is more
| suited to VFX and layer-based compositing to motion
| graphics.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Adobe is at a weird place.
|
| I'm grandfathered in with a 30$ a month deal. I rarely use
| Photoshop/Lightroom and the PDF editor.
|
| If I had to pay the full 60$ a month I'd cancel.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| How are you grandfathered? Fake student ID?
| saaaaaam wrote:
| You just tell them that you don't find it valuable and if
| you've been a customer for long enough they will bend over
| backwards to keep you. I used to buy several copies of CS3
| and CS4 back when they came on DVD and I'm still using the
| same account, and moved to subscriptions with three seats
| as soon as they came in. So my LTV is probably fairly
| compared to a normal "consumer" account where they've only
| ever subscribed. Obviously compared to an enterprise
| account it's nothing, but if you're buying enterprise
| licensing I imagine you're getting it for less than $30 per
| seat per month.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Every time they try to bump me up to a higher plan I tell
| them that I don't need it any more and it's too expensive and
| they give me stupid deals. I think currently I'm paying $25 a
| month but they refunded me the first month where I
| accidentally lapsed back onto the "real" pricing, and gave me
| the next four months for free. So basically $175 for the
| year. I'll probably cancel it next time it comes up though, I
| basically only use it for complicated PDF stuff, and I'm sure
| I can find something else to do that.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| This is basically it, just complain and they'll cut you a
| deal.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I'm _not_ a fan of Adobe at all but I used to do a lot of work
| in Photoshop. The top features for nearly 30 years have not
| been the destructive editing portion of the app but the
| composition tools.
|
| By composition tools I mean the layer, channel, and layer
| effects tools. Layer effects/adjustments and masks make for
| easy compositing and live readjustment. It's the live nature of
| these features which is helpful because you're having to
| constantly refine the look of things based on a client's
| feedback. Photoshop manages to handle all sorts of layering
| while still providing color correct output.
|
| It's not glamorous but it's important and most supposed
| Photoshop competitors over the decades fail at it. Some tools
| do many of the same things but I don't know of apps that can do
| everything Photoshop does it that space.
|
| It's fine to snipe at Photoshop users that only have very basic
| needs for which Photoshop is overkill. I don't do anything
| graphic design anymore so Pixelmator and Affinity Photo have my
| needs covered. I purchased both and they've been well worth the
| money. But if you want to actually go after professional
| Photoshop users, not just incidental users, you really need
| 100% of Photoshop's functionality. Otherwise you'll miss a
| must-have feature that some designer requires for their
| workflow.
|
| As much as I've enjoyed Pixelmator it's not even 50% of
| Photoshop's capabilities. It's not even on par with the decades
| old Photoshop 6.
| pier25 wrote:
| I agree. The feature that keeps me using Illustrator vs all
| the other vector graphics apps is group isolation. Nobody has
| implemented this properly and it's a deal breaker since my
| vector workflow relies on groups instead of using layers.
|
| OTOH it could very well be that Apple intends to invest into
| Pixelmator and make it a pro app.
|
| Time will tell.
| hggigg wrote:
| Great news. Hopefully this will drive enough improvements to
| finally get me off adobe. Photomator is nearly good enough to
| replace Lightroom and Pixelmator is much nicer than photoshop for
| casual users.
| poochkoishi728 wrote:
| Astonishingly to me at the time, the app never had a History
| function (as in Photoshop, list of history you could click
| through). I had been waiting 3+ years for it to materialize, in
| order to purchase it. Have since moved on to vector editors and
| don't see a need to go back.
|
| *Actually now that I think about it, I don't seem to miss the
| lack of History in vector editors (and just use undo).
| ModernMech wrote:
| Will fit right in with iMovie, which doesn't allow you to
| select the resolution of the exported video. It's like the
| island of misfit apps.
| JimDabell wrote:
| iMovie lets you select the resolution. File > Share > File,
| and the dialog that pops up has a picker for resolution right
| underneath the picker for format.
| ModernMech wrote:
| It defaults to the maximum resolution of the first clip
| that you import. So if you import a 720p movie first and
| want to export to 4k later on, you can't. You can export
| smaller but not larger. To export at 4K, you have to get
| rid of everything, import a 4k clip, and put everything
| back. And even then, resolutions are preset, you can't do a
| custom resolution.
| JimDabell wrote:
| I think _"iMovie can't upscale"_ is a lot more accurate
| then. _"iMovie doesn 't allow you to select the
| resolution"_ is very misleading, because it does allow
| you to do that.
| ModernMech wrote:
| No, it's not just about upscaling, please re-read what I
| wrote. iMovie _can_ upscale. You just have to trick it
| into doing so, because you can 't set the resolution.
| Also, you are limited to the 720, 1080, 4k etc. If you
| want to export a square movie you can't. Best option is
| to export from iMovie and crop it in iPhoto.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > you can't set the resolution
|
| You keep saying that, but you _can_ set the resolution
| though. I set the resolution every time I export from
| iMovie. You're telling me it doesn't have an option I've
| used every single time I've opened the app.
|
| Your complaint is not that you can't set the resolution,
| your complaint is that it doesn't have the options you
| want.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Okay so how do I set the resolution of an output video to
| 100 x 100 in iMovie?
|
| (The answer of course is that you cannot)
|
| And yes, my complaint is that it doesn't have the options
| I want, which makes it a deficient video editor -- the
| same way an image editor not having history makes it
| deficient. I want to set arbitrary resolutions on the
| output video, not be relegated to 540 720 and 1080, and I
| don't want to have to do gymnastics to get it to upscale.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I bought and used Pixelmator a long time ago, but stopped right
| after Affinity Photo (and Designer) came out. I didn't follow its
| development very closely since then. Has anyone used both
| Pixelmator and Affinity Photo recently? I'd appreciate some
| comparison here.
| karolist wrote:
| Huge congratulations team, you were always one of the few
| Lithuanian companies I'm proud to talk about.
|
| Didziausi sveikinimai!
| joshstrange wrote:
| Pixelmator is my favorite photo editing tool. It's like Photoshop
| without the baggage/subscription and is perfect for the types of
| edits I need to do. I'm cautiously optimistic about this
| acquisition, I almost hope Apple just makes it free as part of
| the iLife suite (or whatever it's called now).
| barkingcat wrote:
| Wow love pixelmator! Great for team but Uncertain for product.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Pure speculation: This is about visionOS. Photo editing is the
| least friction "pro" task to bring to a spatial computing
| platform.
|
| The other options I considered:
|
| -- Renewed interesting in pro use cases in general. I don't see
| enough incentive for this. Apple's historical interest in this
| was winning over creatives, but particularly creatives interested
| in photography are already won.
|
| -- Apple wanted the tech for something on iOS. I don't think
| there's enough "special sauce" tech Pixelmator has to justify
| this. Pixelmator's tech is only valuable as a full package.
| robenkleene wrote:
| I think Pixelmator probably already runs on visionOS (I don't
| have one personally) but I doubt they spend enough engineering
| resources to make it amazing because the ROI isn't worth it for
| a third party company. But of course Apple can make Pixelmator
| amazing on visionOS without even noticing the cost.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Hasn't Apple just discontinued Vision Pro?
| echoangle wrote:
| Did they? Do you have a link? All I can find is some rumors
| about reducing production.
| latexr wrote:
| They didn't. The thing you found about reducing production
| is likely what GP is thinking of. The headlines had several
| people thinking the same as them on first read.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41925329
| robenkleene wrote:
| There have been a couple of bits in the news about Vision
| Pro, the specific hardware product. Nobody knows their plans
| for the future of the platform as a whole though. They just
| hosted a developer event for visionOS a few weeks ago
| https://www.toddheberlein.com/blog/2024/10/3/a-cozy-wwdc
| latexr wrote:
| They have not. They stopped production on the current version
| of the hardware, which is not the same thing as discontinuing
| the product.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41925006
| asimpletune wrote:
| Combining Pixelmator and Procreate via airdrop is such a nice
| workflow. I'm happy for the team and I'm holding out hope this
| will be good for Mac users in the long run. A Blackmagic
| acquisition would also be interesting. It's too bad there isn't a
| vector drawing app that's at the same level of Mac integration as
| Pixelmator. I've used Inkscape and it was amazing but
| unfortunately very slow.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Sketch might be what you're looking for:
|
| https://www.sketch.com
| justmarc wrote:
| Well deserved. Congratulations to the Pixelmator team!
| lynndotpy wrote:
| 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.
| mikey_p wrote:
| I dunno, I thought "sherlocking" wouldn't be a thing if they
| acquired instead of duplicating their solution in-house, but
| it's the same effect, just more equitable to the original
| creators.
| bromuro wrote:
| DarkSky wasn't available in app stores other then US so I don't
| even know what are you talking about :(
| prophesi wrote:
| It started off only using the USA's National Weather Service
| as a source[0] but gradually added international support[1].
| But even then, outside of the US/UK, you would have been
| better off finding an app that you know uses your region's
| weather stations.
|
| [0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oliviadam/dark-sky-
| hype...
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190110174010/https://darksk
| y.n...
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Nothing beats the buienradar
| lucianbr wrote:
| There's always a way.
|
| On the other hand, does it help to worry? I don't think you can
| influence Apple.
| ablation wrote:
| Why worry about something you have no control over? Keep using
| it, but be exploring alternatives now in case it does. Don't
| waste energy fretting over this.
| bbor wrote:
| I mean, we're on a forum. There's not much else to discuss on
| forums than the past and the future.
| latexr wrote:
| I feel like those ideas are contradictory. Exploring
| alternatives just in case _is_ wasting energy.
|
| For example, for months I've been thinking of trying Inkscape
| to replace Affinity Designer, yet I keep putting it off
| because I'm not exactly enthused about the idea of having to
| learn yet another vector app again and deal with all its bugs
| and quirks.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Exploring is not wasted. Fretting is wasted.
| latexr wrote:
| It is wasted, because in this situation you're forced to
| do it. If you end up not switching, all the time you
| spent trying something else comes to nothing. If you do
| switch, you were still forced to spend a bunch of time
| looking for something.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| For me, "nothing" is rarely true. When I've had to learn
| a tool that operated in a different way, I've often come
| away realizing that I could think about a common task
| differently, or that there are capabilities I didn't
| realize I wanted.
|
| I this case I'm thinking of domain-specific tools meant
| for creation or curation, like an IDE, image editor, word
| processor, etc. That wouldn't apply to bureaucratic
| paperwork-type tools, where learning the site is
| typically a one-off and is pure waste.
| latexr wrote:
| Yes, I agree, "nothing" won't always be true. But I felt
| like the idea came across and that having to overly
| explain and nitpick my own clarification was unnecessary.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Who is "fretting". Someone just asked one question.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Asking a question isn't worrying.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 bought DarkSky for their
| tech rather than their userbase, so it wouldn't make any sense
| for them to reduce its computational quality.
|
| > _and not even close to feature complete._
|
| To be honest, I don't really remember what else was in DarkSky,
| I just used it for its main feature -- rain over the next hour.
| But the Apple Weather app has a ton of features. Is there one
| or more specific features you're missing?
|
| I think it sucks for Android users that Apple bought it. But
| for iOS I've been totally happy to have it integrated, rather
| than dealing with 2 separate apps.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I think weather is ... fine. I liked darksky better, it was
| more focused and less cluttered. It's purely a design, not
| functionality thing for me.
| grahamj wrote:
| I was (selfishly) happy with the acquisition because DarkSky
| didn't support where I live. Now I have hyperlocal rain
| notifications I didn't get before.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| I miss the visualization, but IMO the biggest feature loss is
| the history feature. You could select any day in the past,
| even going back decades, and get historical weather
| information.
|
| The hyper-local rain forecasts were always accurate for me
| with DarkSky. The "rain starting in 3 minutes, stopping in
| 10" was accurate. But right now, Apple Weather is telling me
| it's cloudy and raining where I'm at, and I'm looking outside
| my window to clear skies and dry ground.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yeah, Apple Weather is not even accurate 95% of the time in
| north eastern Toronto 1 hour ahead...
|
| And sometimes it's bizarrely off, like saying the UV index
| is 1 on a cloudless June afternoon. There's no sanity
| checking to speak off.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _And sometimes it's bizarrely off, like saying the UV
| index is 1 on a cloudless June afternoon. There's no
| sanity checking to speak off._
|
| That sounds like weather data that hasn't updated for
| hours because you have a bad connection or something.
|
| It does drive me nuts that _all_ weather apps I 've ever
| used always show you the previously loaded data, even if
| it's 5 days stale. I absolutely despise this "optimistic"
| UX model where it assumes that the most recent data is
| "good enough" until new data is fetched. Especially since
| it never even tells you how stale the data is.
|
| Like, if weather data is more than two hours old, I'd
| rather you show me nothing, because then at least I know
| to go outside and check, rather than be deceived by the
| app lying to me.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It happens after multiple refreshes, and it's just a
| specific example I chose out of many cases... though it
| may be possible that the backend server just ignores all
| that and sends me old data anyways...
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _But right now, Apple Weather is telling me it 's cloudy
| and raining where I'm at, and I'm looking outside my window
| to clear skies and dry ground._
|
| Huh, I definitely haven't experienced that with the chart
| that shows rain over the next hour, the part that comes
| from DarkSky.
|
| What happens when you look at the rainfall map timeline
| from the past couple hours and the prediction over the
| couple next?
|
| Are you just on the very edge of rain/sun? Or is it all
| super spotty? Or is it totally and completely wrong
| regionwide? And is the historical data from the previous
| couple hours accurate at least?
|
| Just curious where the problem is coming from. Because it's
| visually pretty obvious how it works when you look at it.
| dwaite wrote:
| > I miss the visualization, but IMO the biggest feature
| loss is the history feature.
|
| AFAIK this is still in the API (although it wasn't at
| launch). Apple is fine with third party weather apps that
| provide all the information within WeatherKit.
|
| > The hyper-local rain forecasts were always accurate for
| me with DarkSky.
|
| DarkSky didn't magically rectify the difference between the
| macro predicted weather and hyperlocal forecasting either.
| One is a legitimate weather model, one is vectoring based
| on the last few radar maps.
|
| Apple just still puts the macro predictions up front, and
| treats hyperlocal as short term badging/alerts.
|
| > But right now, Apple Weather is telling me it's cloudy
| and raining where I'm at
|
| Does it say "rain will continue for the next hour", e.g. a
| hyperlocal forecast?
| jshier wrote:
| 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
| after an Apple backend deployment. :D
| tiahura wrote:
| "cloud coverage percentage"
|
| Have you tried windows?
| shagie wrote:
| yr.no is the only one that I've found that _really_ does
| cloud coverage well.
|
| https://www.yr.no/en/details/graph/2-4887398/United%20State
| s...
|
| https://www.yr.no/en/details/table/2-4887398/United%20State
| s...
|
| You'll note not only cloud cover %, but fog, low, middle,
| and high level cloud amounts.
|
| The API is documented https://developer.yr.no
|
| https://api.met.no/weatherapi/locationforecast/2.0/compact?
| l...
| wut42 wrote:
| Cloud coverage seems to be back in iOS 18 "Add cloud cover
| percentage by cloud layer to the current weather forecast"
| wrongotron wrote:
| 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
| and see the trend almost instantly. Apple Weather requires
| this awkward tap and drag gesture to see actual temperature
| values through the day.
|
| Apple weather puts all sorts of weather data at the same
| level, despite the utility being wildly different. I need to
| know the temperature trend for the day, or rain chance. Wind
| speed isn't very useful to me day to day, yet they are at the
| same "level" of UI access. It doesn't feel very driven by
| user needs, but perhaps there are a lot more sailors using
| the app than I realize.
| ezfe wrote:
| How does it fail? Are you qualitatively saying it's
| just...worse?
|
| I understand UI criticism but I've seen lots of people
| instantly saying it's worse when it's working just as well
| as Dark Sky ever did for me.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's likely that the focus will be less on making power users
| happy. That's usually the consequence of such acquisitions.
| blihp wrote:
| The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially
| diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... most of what you liked
| about Pixelmator is likely no more over the next year or two.
| Depending on Apple's reasoning for the acquisition (i.e. how
| much of it was just for the talent vs the product) you'll may
| see some small glimpses of Pixelmator's influence a couple
| years from now in Apple's stuff. Most of the time Apple doesn't
| keep the acquired product around.
| askafriend wrote:
| Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have
| built anyway if they made an attempt.
|
| The difference here is how aligned the original team is with
| their acquirer...down to the corner radius on every button.
|
| With other products like Dark Sky, the product is
| substantially different in philosophy or design.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the
| Photos app and Apple doesn't actually want to have a
| separate image editor (let alone two).
|
| They used to have Aperture competing with Lightroom and
| then decided pro photography wasn't a space they needed to
| be in, has something changed where now they want their own
| Photoshop competitor?
| zarzavat wrote:
| This would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way
| more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Dark Sky would've added more value if they'd just renamed
| it Weather and made it the built-in app, and yet...
|
| I do hope they'll offer Pixelmator as an included app on
| Macs and Pixelmator Pro alongside Logic, Finalcut, and
| other "Pro" software. The lack of a built-in image editor
| can be annoying.
|
| Photos works for some stuff, Preview includes basic
| adjustments too, but sometimes you just want something
| like a hue/saturation adjustment instead of color
| temperature and pink/green tint, or multiple layers so
| you can experiment with different edits non-
| destructively.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| Eh, I don't think it's the same thing. The gulf between
| "photos user" and "pixelmator" user is quite high, much
| more so than "weather app" and "weather app but better".
|
| In particular, if you have the average user Pixelmator,
| they'd be worse off. The same isn't really true with
| weather or darksky - they really just do the same thing.
|
| We still have iMovie and FinalCut, GarageBand and Logic.
| Apple has kept two different product lines before.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| There's no way Apple can build this. Their human interface
| people all seem to be gone on the desktop. So many things
| work so bad these days when they migrated to the new ui
| framework.
| askafriend wrote:
| Logic Pro for Mac is regarded very well.
|
| When they make a focused effort in professional software,
| Apple can deliver.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| At the time Apple bought eMagic, Logic's UI sucked. It
| actually had dialogs that told you to "reboot the dialog
| for changes to take effect."
|
| Given how well-regarded Logic is today, it must be
| drastically improved. I haven't looked at it lately, but
| am considering the bundle with Motion and FCP.
|
| One piece of software Apple built in-house is Motion.
| While it suffers from a few UI gaffes, it was an
| innovative product that still has no competitor in the
| motion-graphics space.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| On acquisitions like DarkSky (RIP), sure. This looks a lot
| more like a Logic-style acquisition.
|
| Pixelmator would slot nicely into the same consumer set of
| productivity apps that ship with all Macs (Pages, Numbers,
| Keynote). Photomator will get them back into the market they
| abandoned when Aperture was shuttered.
|
| Speaking of Aperture... am I the only person who remembers
| that Apple owns Claris? Why didn't Apple just hand off
| Aperture to Claris and say "just keep this thing working on
| new MacOS releases"?
| SllX wrote:
| Claris isn't really a dumping ground anymore. That's how it
| started, but they've evolved their own business since then.
| grahamj wrote:
| ugh don't get me started about Aperture. I'm still salty
| about that.
| sersi wrote:
| 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
| kergonath wrote:
| > 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.
| grahamj wrote:
| 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.
| kergonath wrote:
| > I miss full tagging and smart album support
|
| Yes! And plugins are great, but the experience is not
| smooth, and quickly annoying when working with many
| photos. Also, switching libraries is not good. I wish it
| were more integrated because on paper, a photo management
| app combining the features of Affinity, DxO, and others
| sounds fantastic.
| iwontberude wrote:
| And the management team that brought us ClarisWorks is
| still leading Apps to this day. Apple doesn't wipe out
| management during acquisitions, it permanently entrenches
| them in their structure.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I don't understand why companies buy other companies for the
| talent and not product. Why not just make everyone working
| there an incredible offer at the same time? It would cost so
| so so much less than these massive buy outs. Maybe not all of
| them would take you up on it, but if you buy the company a
| lot of them may not stick around post-buyout anyway. I feel
| like this would be a lot more effective also because in a
| buyout, employees just make the same old salary at the new
| company. In my method, they make a ton more and are more
| likely to stay
| alexwhb wrote:
| Ya that's a solid point. Though many startups give their
| employees equity options... so you have to factor that in
| too. Also buying a start up for talent seems risky since
| many people that join startups are looking for a totally
| different energy than a large corporation, so it seems
| reasonable that there'd be a big drop off of that talent as
| soon as it gets acquired... especially if the vision is not
| aligned
| dahart wrote:
| 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 competition ethically may be the
| goal.
|
| Buying the competition's customers, and/or distribution
| channels may be the goal.
|
| Acquiring the top talent, while giving them the expected
| reward for having bootstrapped a company, might be the
| goal. Founders are often uninterested in a salaried
| position for themselves, but may be interested in a return
| for the company and payoff for everyone in it - as backpay
| for their investment, completely separate from their salary
| going forward.
|
| Also, your hypothesis is not accurate. Buyouts are not
| always, or even usually, massive. It's common for them to
| be small and medium sized. It is definitely not a given
| that making persuasive individual offers would be any
| cheaper than an acquisition, let alone "so much" cheaper.
| Depends entirely on the situation.
| tiahura wrote:
| Unethical by whom? The now richer employees? Or the salty
| cheapskate?
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| tiahura wrote:
| 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 SSSS 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 SS 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.").
| 93po wrote:
| 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 often in buyouts anyway
| dahart wrote:
| 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
| dwaite wrote:
| Sometimes that does happen.
|
| Apple historically tends to look for shipping results, and
| the underlying software and services (such as using
| DarkSky's algorithms and server code as starting points)
| are often worth it over just putting offers out to key
| people.
|
| This obviously isn't always true; they do have some longer-
| term research projects and strategic initiatives we've seen
| leak out (cars and non-invasive blood glucose monitoring
| are common mentioned ones), but I think Apple generally
| would prefer to let others succeed or fail in the research.
|
| There's nothing _to_ Pixelmator IMHO other than the
| product. Apple knows how to do sepia tone filters already.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Apple did do that when they were building an electric car:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/business/apple-s-auto-
| ambiti...
| jahewson wrote:
| No, this was a failing business and the employees fled.
| jahewson wrote:
| > Why not just make everyone working there an incredible
| offer at the same time?
|
| Under civil law this is regarded as tortious interference.
| Businesses have a contract with their employees and if you
| interfere with it to harm the employer then you are liable
| for damages.
|
| If you tried to make a mass offer like this, the employer
| could likely get a judge to place an injunction against it
| immediately.
|
| If they don't notice until further down the line, watch
| out: damages are unlimited. They can extend to a judge
| breaking up your new business unit and handing it back to
| the original employer or rewarding damages of the entire
| lifetime value of the business unit.
|
| That's why you never see companies do this :)
| cultureswitch wrote:
| I wonder what's the theory of harm behind such law.
| Employers competing over talent is... illegal? Explains a
| lot actually.
| SupremumLimit wrote:
| 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.
| 93po wrote:
| 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
| 1123581321 wrote:
| When a mass employment offer is made to steal or destroy
| another business, it's usually something ridiculous. For
| developers it might be a million a year each, for
| example. It's not an amount intended to be paid
| perpetually so it can be larger than the defending
| business can be paying to retain.
|
| It is not illegal to do general hiring at good rates and
| shop for employees at a particular company. That wouldn't
| have the same results as buying a company. Plus, you
| wouldn't own their creations; you'd have to rebuild or
| clean room steal it.
| dahart wrote:
| You're assuming that a startup has more money than a
| larger company. Why?
|
| And since when has a company's reputation stopped them
| from doing business?
| Applejinx wrote:
| 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'.
| 93po wrote:
| it's ridiculous how america is all about free markets
| except for the instances where rich people could lose
| money, then suddenly free markets are bad and evil
| dahart wrote:
| Which rich people are you talking about, the buyer or the
| seller? Presumably the buyer of a startup is richer than
| the startup founders. If poaching all the employees of a
| company was legal, then we'd end up with only monopolies
| by the largest and richest, and it would be legal for big
| companies to crush smaller competition. The playing field
| in the U.S. and everywhere globally is definitely biased
| toward the rich, but you're inadvertently arguing for
| even greater concentration of wealth, it doesn't seem
| like this argument is well thought out.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Logic and and Final Cut were bought and developed since.
| Pixelmator fills the open Photoshop space in an Apple way,
| and will plausibly go the same way -- no vague pessimism
| required.
| mrzool wrote:
| I really, really hope you're right about that.
| mxey wrote:
| Workflow becoming Shortcuts mostly as-is would be a
| counterexample.
| 39896880 wrote:
| Note that this hasn't happened with Shazam, miraculously
| Insanity wrote:
| 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.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| That's interesting. Is Shazam a default control center
| button for new phones? I don't remember how mine got
| there. (There's still probably a discovery issue with
| those buttons as they're just icons.)
| 39896880 wrote:
| 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
| iwontberude wrote:
| I want to point out that the same management team that
| brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps. Apple drag and
| drops teams into their org chart and gives them tons of
| autonomy.
| brokencode wrote:
| Really? Even though the company is in Lithuania? It seems
| like they'd probably keep on working on Pixelmator or
| something closely related since any other teams would be a
| long way away.
| whalesalad wrote:
| LOL. Yes, of course. It'll probably go terribly.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Can you get MyRadar on iphone? It's no DarkSky, but it's the
| best replacement I've found (for Android at least).
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > Is there any way this can go bad?
|
| 6 months they'll realize they can't fit in with Apple's culture
| and most of the team will hit the road.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| You'd assume that their new deal with Apple will involve a
| certain amount of stock based comp with a cliff. Golden
| handcuffs.
| archagon wrote:
| Apple is all-in on services revenue. They could decide to
| switch this to a subscription model just like their most recent
| pro apps.
| dwaite wrote:
| Pixelmator already has been switching products over to
| subscription.
| archagon wrote:
| It looks like they still offer a lifetime IAP, though.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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? Being acquired by Apple doesn't seem to
| be the obvious death knell that it is for other companies.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I wish every acquisition improved the end product as much as
| Workflow's did. All Apple's OSes got better for embracing it.
| I can write and have written AppleScript things, but
| Shortcuts is a vastly more convenient UX for the things it's
| good at.
| azinman2 wrote:
| What do you use it for?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Let's see, I have 157 shortcuts defined at the moment.
| That wasn't due to some mass effort, just a bunch of
| little things that accumulated over time.
|
| I have one shortcut that shares the song I'm currently
| listening to in Apple Music to Mastodon. I use iA Writer
| for my work notes, and another shortcut creates a new
| note with today's date with wiki links to yesterday's and
| tomorrow's notes. (I use that one with Keyboard Maestro:
| if I'm in iA Writer and press F2, it opens that note (or
| creates it if it didn't already exist)). One runs on a
| cron job and copies any new links I've added to GoodLinks
| to my Pocket account so that it'll sync to my Kobo.
| Here's one that runs a custom sorting script on my
| OmniFocus projects. This one dims my office lights; I use
| Keyboard Maestro (again) to link it to one of the buttons
| on my Stream Deck.
|
| Basically, for me it's the equivalent of shell scripting
| for GUI apps. I wouldn't want to write a whole app with
| it, but for quick and dirty automation jobs it's
| terrific.
| xnyan wrote:
| I have tons that solve small annoyances or paper over
| things I forget. As an example, I listen to an audiobook
| in audible many nights to sleep, but I often forget to
| set the sleep timer. Very annoying to have to scrub back
| hours to find the last thing you remember. I have a
| shortcut that activates when my iphone is in sleep focus
| that automatically sets the audible sleep timer for me.
| It's a little thing, but it's a great quality of life
| improvement and eliminates my need to think about sleep
| timers.
| dbbk wrote:
| I totally forgot TestFlight started out third party
| gardaani wrote:
| > what other products with users has Apple acquired and shut
| down?
|
| Shake was acquired in 2002 and killed 7 years later.
| xattt wrote:
| It was wild to see Linux and a Pentium III listed as a
| supported system on an Apple site in 2004.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20040613170323/http://www.apple
| ....
| wut42 wrote:
| Funny how they were selling the Linux version for $2000
| more.
| awwstn wrote:
| Shazam is a huge success story!
| jhdias wrote:
| In what way, specifically for android users?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| In this way https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id
| =com.shazam.and...
| mh- wrote:
| For posterity:
|
| _> 4.8 star / 10.5M reviews_
|
| _> 500M+ Downloads_
|
| _> No data shared with third parties_
| mintplant wrote:
| It (optionally) integrates with the Apple Music Android
| app now, and offers to add to your library there whenever
| you scan a song, so I assume it's a good funnel for them
| to get people into their service ecosystem.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| We'll put Shazam in the Filemaker category of continuing to
| exist, but not really benefiting from Apple.
| culi wrote:
| It's built in to Siri though. So Apple benefitted from
| Shazam. I'd say Apple's Weather app has also
| significantly benefitted (albeit a bit late) from Dark
| Sky's acquisition
| sumedh wrote:
| > but not really benefiting from Apple.
|
| It gives Apple the data/insights which new artists are
| getting popular. Maybe they can use it to negotiate
| prices with artists.
| abenga wrote:
| 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.
| jcheng wrote:
| FingerWorks! I had their iGesture Pad.
|
| Although maybe they were on their last legs before the
| acquisition, and it led to multitouch being everywhere, so
| great outcome anyway.
| docmars wrote:
| Another controversial one was Lala.com, if I recall right --
| they shut it down right away, but it had an avid user base.
|
| I get why Apple wouldn't want to maintain two music services,
| so that engineering talent likely got absorbed into iTunes.
| It's yet another story where the competition was offering
| something really good / unique, drawing in customers
| interested in those differentiators, and it ended up
| disappointing a lot of people getting bought out.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Beats still continues to make slightly cheaper headphones.
| FoundationDB is still there.
|
| Final Cut Pro was bought from Macromedia. And Logic from
| Emagic. And off the top of my head Astarte (iDVD), FileMaker
| (FileMaker Pro and Bento, though that was originally spun out
| or Apple in the first place), SoundJam (iTunes), Siri (Siri).
|
| All of these were mildly- to hugely-successful products.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Shake was a big one. Apple loved to put Lord of the Rings and
| King Kong on its homepage, but Jobs always seemed pissed that
| they couldn't dumb Shake down. Artists at Weta, ILM, Etc and
| others were not about to tolerate a gimped product.
|
| Unfortunate side note: Apple was going to open-source Shake,
| but abandoned the idea after realizing it would face an
| endless parade of patent trolls if people were able to scour
| the entire codebase line by line.
| generalpf wrote:
| 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...
| shagie wrote:
| You can get WeatherKit cross platform.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/weatherkitrestapi
|
| https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/ - the pricing is
| comparable to the original -
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150811201137/https://developer...
| (Apple: 1M calls is $50, original 1M calls is $100)
|
| "Alexa, ask Big Sky for the weather" -
| https://imgur.com/oRLTe04
|
| Notice in that upper left corner the credit for the source
| data.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
| cageface wrote:
| It's worthless in Thailand. I was checking it last week
| with a Thai friend here in Bangkok. The forecast was clear
| skies while in fact we had an epic monsoon storm.
|
| This is typical here.
| luuurker wrote:
| Apple Weather isn't as accurate as DarkSky used to be for
| me here in Europe, especially rain prediction.
| macintux wrote:
| 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.
| socksy wrote:
| Sounds like they truly did incorporate Dark Sky's weather
| prediction then!
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
| thfuran wrote:
| I think a company anywhere near the size of Apple being
| permitted to acquire another company is, in and of itself, bad.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Really glad for them. Pixelmator Pro is my go-to image editing
| software. Reminds me of Fireworks (which I really liked, but then
| Adobe happened) with slightly worse vector functionalities.
|
| Curious if anybody has a good "combined" editor to suggest.
| askafriend wrote:
| Best photo editing tool out there for most people. Incredible
| interface design and integration with the OS.
|
| And such a natural fit of acquirer. This makes total sense and
| I'm excited to see what comes out of this!
| mikey_p wrote:
| I'm still on Pixelmator classic 3.9 (it's what I have a license
| for) and it's great. Does everything I need easily as a casual
| user, and it hasn't changed in years! I've never even thought
| about upgrading.
| nesk_ wrote:
| The upgrade is worth it for vector image editing.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| I'd never heard of Pixelmator before (congrats to them on the
| exit), and:
|
| WOW their website already looks like an Apple website. The
| colors, the font, the logo with the same colors as Apple Photos,
| all the images that show a Mac window, the shade of red in the
| top right, the "machine learning" section that almost looks like
| Notes, and I scrolled down and it's all about how great Mac is.
|
| It seemed inevitable that Apple would either acquire or copy
| them, with how much this already looks like an Apple product, and
| is exclusively made for Mac apparently.
| turnsout wrote:
| It's not that unique--a lot of Apple-ecosystem developers take
| _heavy_ inspiration from Apple 's design language.
| balls187 wrote:
| Back before I switched to mac's, the visual quality of
| applications for OSX vs Windows was night and day.
|
| Coda (by panic) was one that I remember vividly.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's a really nice app, I use it all the time. Definitely feels
| like the sort of app Apple would have made themselves.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| I am a Pixelmator Pro user and this move does not surprise me.
| The app has a very "first party, use MacOSX the way it is
| supposed to be used" feel to it and their website has always
| looked a lot like Apple's. I can't imagine them ever wanting to
| port the code to another OS.
|
| I purchased Pixelmator Pro years ago. I think I bought it for
| half price in a sale but even at the current listed price of
| $50 it is a steal. I am in not way a pro image editor but it
| has done everything I needed it to.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Pixelmator has also been app store-only, and I prefer Mac apps
| that are downloadable from the company's website. This is
| probably another example of them posturing themselves for
| acquisition by Apple.
|
| It's also the reason I use the Affinity suite rather than
| Pixelmator.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| They've been in the Mac app store for 13 years.
| xyst wrote:
| Great news for Pixelmator group/founders (probably a decent exit
| package). Not sure how I feel about the end user experience owned
| by Apple though.
|
| Apple has acquired many apps and often either killed them,
| silently (dark sky?), or UX gone down the toilet.
|
| Probably be one of the use cases cited when big tech is broken up
| dylan604 wrote:
| Killed but what did they do with the tech? Did it find its way
| into something else? The Apple Weather app has seen lots of
| positive development that I've assumed was integration of Dark
| Sky into their app rather than keeping it a separate app.
| exabrial wrote:
| can we re-release the modal version? LOVE full modal apps!
| sroussey wrote:
| Hopefully they will use the Pixelmator remove object model in
| photos since it is so much better than the Apple one in 18.1.
| echoangle wrote:
| Can someone give some insight why acquisitions like this happen?
| Is it to take over the user base or is it actually about the
| product itself?
|
| I am asking because I always hear of multi-million dollar
| acquisitions and wonder if apple (in this case) couldn't just
| create the same software themselves cheaper.
| aiaf wrote:
| Apple can bring in new users beyond Pixelmator's wildest
| dreams. This is definitely a product/talent acquisition. And
| Pixelmator has almost 2 decades worth of development already
| baked in, not sure how anyone can do it cheaper.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 2 decades worth of development usually also mean 2 decades
| worth of tech debt.
|
| Most time consuming part of development of old software is
| trying to go around limitations inherited from past
| decisions.
| chias wrote:
| Call me jaded but
|
| > Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.
|
| the vast majority of the time the exciting updates end up being:
|
| 1. The product you know and love will continue with no
| difference! We just have free funding! Isn't that great!
|
| 2. We have stopped sales of the product, but don't worry, if you
| already own it you can continue to use it.
|
| 3. On X date it will stop working. Please migrate over to [other
| thing] which only has a smallsubset of the features you came to
| us for. Thank you for coming on this wonderful adventure with us,
| we are so grateful that you trusted us, though obviously this was
| misplaced. Byeeeeee.
|
| which, in fairness, is quite "exciting" if you rely on the
| software / service. Just not pleasantly exciting.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| There's a great Tumblr that tracks this exact phenomenon
|
| https://www.tumblr.com/ourincrediblejourney
| hotgeart wrote:
| How can I read this without making an account?
| Vegenoid wrote:
| I think this has happened enough times for it to no longer be a
| "jaded" view, it is the empirically supported view.
| grahamj wrote:
| 4. Screw you guys, now I sleep on a bed of money with many
| beautiful women
| saaaaaam wrote:
| and/or other people reflective of a non-heteronormative
| worldview.
| rchaud wrote:
| If tech moguls have shown us one thing, it is that money
| beyond one's wildest dreams is still not enough to be happy.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| never has been.
| config_yml wrote:
| I don't think that's universally true though. An example would
| be Logic, which Apple kept improving after buying it and it's
| still a great piece of software.
| facialwipe wrote:
| RIP Pixelmator.
| softfalcon wrote:
| I know this isn't likely... but a part of me is going, "and so
| the downfall of Adobe supremacy begins..." _evil cackling_
|
| It would be hilarious watching them scramble to actually compete
| with an equal footing player for once.
|
| (Yes, I know I'm probably delusional, but it would be funny to
| watch)
| thewebguyd wrote:
| One can only hope.
|
| Although it's not totally unlikely either. There's a decent
| sized market of prosumer/enthusiast photographers where
| CaptureOne is a bit overkill, but DarkTable isn't intuitive
| enough compared to Lightroom. They don't want the subscription,
| but have no other real choice ever since Aperture was killed.
|
| If Apple continues development of Photomator and continues to
| improve on it I can see it starting to eat away at Lightroom's
| marketshare for the enthusiast/semi-pro market.
|
| Cross-platform is a non issue as that market is majority macOS
| already.
|
| I'm hopeful, as someone that has a photography business on the
| side, that this works out. I miss Aperture, and CaptureOne
| isn't as good as batch editing for events as Lightroom Classic
| (although it's improved quite a bit lately). If Apple can get
| it on par or better than LR classic, and keep the one-time
| purchase model, I'm all in. Screw adobe.
| handsclean wrote:
| Man, I don't think this will be good for users.
|
| The biggest shortcoming of Pixelmator is its lack of Windows
| support. This rules out use in most of the professional world,
| not because one must run Windows, but because one must
| collaborate with others. Pixelmator has long been Apple-centric,
| but while previously I'd hoped that, in the right situation, they
| might expand their strategy, now I can't imagine I will ever be
| able to use Pixelmator for work.
|
| Its second biggest shortcoming is the plugin ecosystem's apathy
| towards it. Apple doesn't have it in their DNA to fix this.
| Apple's developer relations strategy is to own a lucrative enough
| audience that developers will endure anything for access to them.
| Apple doesn't own the audience for professional image editor
| plugins, and I can't imagine them suddenly learning a whole new
| mode of interacting with developers.
|
| Additionally, when a company acquires a much smaller one, they
| really don't care at all about the smaller one's business, they
| care about how their existing business is affected. For example,
| when Apple acquired Dark Sky, they transplanted the features that
| fit into their existing strategy, but they weren't interested in
| crowd sourced data or Android weather apps, so they just deleted
| it, and now the world's weather forecasts are worse. Maybe,
| hopefully, Apple believes their walled garden's value will be
| increased by the addition of a Pixelmator-like product. But I
| fear it's more likely they just want to stick layers in Photos,
| delete the rest, lose every Pixelmator customer, and cry a
| fraction of a tear equal to Pixelmator's profits divided by their
| own.
|
| Affinity sold out, too. I don't know where to go at this point.
| ozten wrote:
| Why do you say Affinity sold out?
| handsclean wrote:
| They sold to Canva, which is strictly subscription based. As
| far as I know there haven't been negative changes yet, but
| we're still in the period before we'd see them.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Did you see the statement from Canva and Serif after those
| kinds of rumors started circling? They made a strong
| statement that they aren't making Affinity apps
| subscription or dissolving the teams on those apps. It's
| not the usual silence on post-acquisition plans.
| giobox wrote:
| The issue with Windows support for tools like Pixelmator is
| that a great many of its features are wrappers around OS level
| image manipulation libraries that come with macOS/iOS - Windows
| doesn't have anything like the rich image manipulation
| libraries built in that macOS has, so to get feature parity
| would very likely involve building from scratch a ton of the
| stuff they didn't have to do on macOS. The Pixelmator
| developers have said this before in their own support forums
| too when question of Windows/Linux support is asked.
|
| This is partly why we often see new image editor apps only hit
| macOS/iOS sometimes, especially if its from a smaller
| development team.
|
| > This rules out use in most of the professional world
|
| I don't agree with this; I have never worked at a company the
| design team weren't all on Macs, regardless of company size.
| Sure it rules out _some_ professional use but I doubt it 's
| even a majority. The output image file assets can be shared
| with any OS etc etc so not like it stops collaboration either.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I don't think this will be good for users, but I do think this is
| the right call at the right time for the company. They get
| (presumably) top dollar for their outfit prior to the next big
| market crash, and just as investor funding is drying up outside
| the AI realms. Hopefully everyone involved gets enough dosh to
| live comfortably, and can focus on their next big passion or
| project once the NDAs and Non-Competes run their course.
|
| For us users... _oof_ , the market just got that much smaller. I
| already avoid Adobe, and I'm considering bailing on Capture One
| (if I could just get those Fuji LUTs elsewhere) for my
| photography hobby; Photomator seemed a natural alternative to
| explore, but now that's no longer the case.
|
| Man, what I would give for Aperture to make a comeback. Just
| something simple, fast, and lacking in feature creep. No pesky AI
| masking or image replacement, just good old hardware-accelerated
| gallery management and image editing sans subscription.
| chaoskanzlerin wrote:
| For what it's worth: a friend of mine has extracted the Fuji
| LUTs from the "official raw converter" and has been using them
| in darktable happily ever after ;)
| ozten wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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 useful functionnalities as anyone but if the
| licensing model change and I don't like it, I am also content
| with not having them. The key us to not taste/knowing about
| them. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.
| ozten wrote:
| > 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| you can usually get away with it by chrooting an old
| release of a distro that has contemporary libs. And this is
| rarely needed as you usually have the sourcees available
| under a free license which allows you to recompike and/or
| port it.
|
| We are talking photoshop anyway so it isn't relevant in
| that case.
| thenberlin wrote:
| 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 months of an Adobe
| subscription (I don't even know exactly what that costs any more
| because Pixelmator + parts of the Affinity suite got me out of
| their clutches).
|
| Adobe must not be stoked about this news. And I'll just keep my
| fingers crossed this all heads in a direction that's more Logic
| than Dark Sky.
| nsbk wrote:
| I can't even remember how long have I been a Pixelmator and
| then Pixelmator pro user. I tried it once and I knew I would
| never go back to Photoshop again. An incredible bang for the
| price as well! Congrats to the Pixelmator team, and hoping for
| a bright future for their product. Fingers crossed though!
| nsbk wrote:
| It's up there along with Procreate, another amazing product
| by an independent studio
| acomjean wrote:
| I used to use Pixelmator when I was on a mac. Its great for
| what it does, but its much much more limited than photoshop.
| Frankly most people don't need Photoshop. The UI is intuitive
| enough. I'm on linux now but missed that "preview" app for
| format/size conversions.
|
| (It has a fun mosaic tool that lets you take a bit of an image
| and tile it real time which is really fun).
|
| >Adobe must not be stoked about this news
|
| Probably any mac developer should be a little worried. Apple
| has a mixed history at best with these applications. They had a
| lightroom competitor (Apeture?) they just dropped out of the
| blue. (some photographers are still griping) The "final cut
| pro" upgrade made people start using adobe again. But apple
| seem to keep the music making stuff going.
|
| Frankly adobe Shold actually port their stuff to linux. The
| "free" competition is getting good (Krita, Blender, Gimp...). I
| have a couple pieces I used Gimp to layer together going into a
| gallery next week. Frankly its different, but pretty good once
| you get used to the UI.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I suspect this move is due to behind the scenes Adobe / Apple
| relations souring over the years.
|
| Adobe used to be one of their biggest supporters and helped
| winning over users to the Mac platform.
|
| This has diverged significantly over the years, and I think
| Apple is looking at Adobe and their business model and
| realizing that it both lucrative for them to have software that
| fills into this market to round out their creative pro apps
| suite and that Adobe increasingly becoming aggressive with cost
| / licensing and tactics to extract revenue aren't good for
| their ecosystem.
|
| That's my working theory, at least.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Creative software and macbooks are complement goods. i.e.,
| demand for macbooks goes up when creative software gets
| cheaper, and vice versa.
|
| This is a case where mergers are expected to make prices go
| down. As opposed for substitute goods, like macbooks and dell
| laptops, where a merger would probably make prices go up.
|
| In both cases you have a prisoner's dilemma between vendors -
| with vendors producing substitute goods, the "defect" option
| is to lower your price. (This makes you more money, but costs
| the other vendor more money than you made.) For substitute
| goods, the "defect" option is to raise your price (this makes
| you more money, but costs the other vendor more money than
| you made.)
|
| So mergers of vendors of substitute goods are usually bad,
| and tend to be blocked, because once merged the companies can
| coordinate to raise prices. But of complement goods are
| usually good, and tend to not be blocked, because once merged
| the companies can coordinate to lower prices.
|
| All this to say that I think this move makes sense for apple
| regardless of whether their relationship with Adobe has
| soured.
| strangemonad wrote:
| If that's the case, why not just buy Affinity
| kstrauser wrote:
| Maybe Canva doesn't want to sell.
| catgirlinspace wrote:
| how is canva related to affinity?
| cianmm wrote:
| Canva owns Affinity as of March
| https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/
| croshan wrote:
| In general, the way a walled garden wins is by providing
| everything its villagers need inside.
|
| And Apple's products seem to create walled gardens in order
| to prioritize [first creative, then economic] control.
|
| Based on the demographic that a significant portion of their
| marketing seems targeted towards (artists and creative
| types), I think your theory sounds likely.
| looping__lui wrote:
| ... didn't Apple switch away from Nvidia, push for OpenCL and
| keep Adobe in the rain when their new release was all super
| optimized for Nvidia? And I think heavily push for their
| proprietary video and image editing software? But Adobe
| rewrote its codebase and had the better product after all.
| And that was 15+ years ago?
|
| One article from back in 2010:
| https://nofilmschool.com/2010/07/apple-snubs-adobe-again-
| wit...
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| I don't think so. Mac sales have only grown and the whole
| "you need a Mac for creative work" hasn't been a thing since
| the 00's.
|
| I think this is more about having the team put advanced photo
| editing features into the native Photos app, and possibly
| contributing to AI image processing.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Not to mention Apple's challenge with 30% AppStore tax for
| subscription revenue.
|
| My guess was that Apple is okay with Apps from third parties
| that tithe 1/3 of their subscription revenue but aren't
| willing to make a place for them if they don't "sing for
| their supper" as my Grandfather used to say.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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?
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| 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.
| codazoda wrote:
| Can you share references for their refusal to fix and their
| excuses?
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I hope this means that we get a photoshop competitor in the pro-
| apps line.
| binarynate wrote:
| As a long time Pixelmator user, this really worries me. I loved
| DarkSky and then Apple acquired and killed it without a good
| replacement (I switched to Wunderground because Apple Weather is
| inaccurate, especially for precipitation predictions).
| vunderba wrote:
| With apple giving away garageband for so long, I was always
| surprised that they didn't have a decent graphics editor option,
| so this makes a lot of sense to me.
|
| Hopefully it means that the pixelmator team will get a larger
| budget as well. It's by far my favorite graphics editor compared
| to affinity, Photoshop, Krita, etc.
|
| Only thing that I really wish it had was a solid puppet warp
| system for deformation like what you see in photopea or
| Photoshop.
| rglover wrote:
| The best company that could have acquired them. A rebirth of
| Apple professional tools is desperately needed. Hopefully this is
| the start of more attention in that direction.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| Even if there's a risk of a "Dark sky" outcome, I'm still happy,
| because I figured that Pixelmator was at long term risk of
| getting squeezed in the photo-editing market. It's just tough for
| indie devs playing with the big boys.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| One of the best purchases I've made. Ridiculously cheap for the
| features it provides. Hope apple doesn't ruin it.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| The greatest news for customers is that Adobe aren't the ones
| buying it
|
| RIP Macromedia Fireworks
| adastra22 wrote:
| Idk, Apple is just as likely to kill it.
| thenberlin wrote:
| Though way less likely to turn it into a cursed subscription
| zombie.
| ghaff wrote:
| Leaving aside pricing specifics, the main issue with
| subscriptions is for products that you just fire up once in
| a great while. So long as the pricing is reasonable, I have
| no particular issue with subscriptions for products I use
| on a routine basis--especially if they're products that
| more or less require ongoing updates to remain useful.
| samatman wrote:
| For me personally, Pixelmator is absolutely a product I
| just fire up once in a great while. I bought it anyway
| because when I need it, I need it. But there's no way I
| would let a program like that deflate my bank account
| like a pricked balloon.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't think you're disagreeing with me. I do subscribe
| to Photoshop mostly because Lightroom makes sense as a
| subscription. Otherwise I'd probably make do with GIMP or
| maybe something like Pixelmator. (I used Photoshop
| Elements for a long time.)
| samatman wrote:
| It doesn't appear that I am. All I meant to add is that
| if Apple turns Pixelmator into a "cursed subscription
| zombie" (and I very much doubt this will happen) then I
| will not be getting that subscription. I expect most
| people wouldn't either.
| knicholes wrote:
| Interesting! Do you think a credits-based pricing would
| be more fair? Only pay for it when you use it? Maybe pay
| per click? Maybe like how cloud providers charge based on
| how long you have it open?
| ghaff wrote:
| Metered pricing is basically cloud pricing. Probably
| reasonable for some uses but uncommon for applications at
| least with major providers.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Hasn't Apple gone the subscription route for ipad apps (I
| am fairly sure I read somewhere that Logic for iPad is
| subscription based)?
| newsclues wrote:
| Doubtful. It might get worked into iPhoto or a new version of
| Aperture as part of their pro apps.
| adastra22 wrote:
| How is that different from what I said?
| newsclues wrote:
| It would be a different name or form but it would not be
| dead.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Incorporating some features into an already existing
| product of their own is still killing the acquired
| product line.
| pridkett wrote:
| That would be a nice outcome. I've been missing a
| replacement for Aperture for years. I'm not a professional
| photographer, but I've got more than 30 years of photos
| inside of Apple Photos. Some old school scans or Photo CDs,
| some RAW from underwater (Photos does a poor job here), and
| a ton of iPhone photos.
|
| Bringing a more premium experience to Photos would be a
| great complement to how you can already shell out to
| Pixelmator while editing photos.
| giobox wrote:
| The big thing Aperture nailed though was photo-management
| workflows - it was never that great as an _image editor_.
| I don 't see anything in Pixelmator that moves the needle
| in an Aperture/Lightroom-type direction by integrating
| photo management, which was the innovation Aperture and
| Lightroom brought back at their roughly similar original
| launch dates. Pixelmator is much more a photoshop
| alternative IMO.
|
| I'd put money on this acquisition being used to improve
| the image editing experience in photos.app on iOS/macOS,
| just like Dark Sky was acquired and then used to improve
| weather.app, rather than any return of Aperture.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| Some time ago they split off Photomator as a more
| Aperture/Lightroom app.
| giobox wrote:
| Ah interesting, hadn't seen Photomator before. That does
| appear to indeed bring a more Aperture type experience to
| the editing process.
| masto wrote:
| Much, much more likely. The only acquisition I can think of
| that Apple has allowed to continue to exist is Shazam.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Emagic's Logic is the pro software example. But they've
| killed others, like Chalice and RAYZ (purchased from
| Silicon Grail) were killed before Apple released Motion,
| and Nothing Real was purchased for Shake which was killed 6
| years later.
| chrismsimpson wrote:
| The only acquisition? Emagic, the original maker of Logic
| was acquired some 20 years ago and now Logic is one of if
| not the flagship software product sold by Apple
| criddell wrote:
| And Siri and Shortcuts.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I was worried Workflow was totally screwed as a product
| after Apple bought it, but they've done a really great
| job at turning it into Shortcuts and integrating it
| across all their platforms.
|
| Being able to put Shortcuts into Control Center in iOS 18
| is a handy option, if anyone missed that you can do that
| now.
| lxe wrote:
| Anyone remember Siri Assistant...?
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Why would they kill it? Is Apple in the graphic design
| business today?
|
| If I was to place a bet: they are looking for the next
| graphics killer app for ipad and macos. They purchased
| Pixelmator because Pixelmator owns the intellectual property
| for all their code and Apple found it more convenient to buy
| complete IP rather than reinventing the wheel.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Man do I ever miss Fireworks. And Dark Sky for that matter.
|
| Fireworks really was _it_ though.
| EGreg wrote:
| I miss Photoshop 5. That's why I was so happy to discover and
| use photopea.com now :)
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Still running CS2 from an old ripped disc over here. Does
| 95% of what I need.
| EGreg wrote:
| My hat's off to you sir! I wish I could do it, but at
| some point MacOS moved on and My CS5 would crap out on
| me. Glad I found a clone online
| OnionBlender wrote:
| Graphite looks like a promising alternative to Fireworks for
| combining vector and raster graphics. I'm looking forward to
| the desktop version.
| GustaBOT wrote:
| I spent a lot of time in the early 2000 with Macromedia apps..
| i miss Director
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Maybe this acquisition keep Adobe up late at night for the coming
| years.
|
| I can never forgive them for making creative cloud such a stupid
| expensive subscription.
| thadk wrote:
| Apple got scared: if Canva moves Affinity Suite to the web then
| that makes Apple computers less valuable unless you pay up for
| Adobe Creative Suite.
|
| Affinity Photo is a bit too powerful for the client-side web
| right now but within the next couple years it's plausible.
| Photoshop already works in the full-stack browser well. Just a
| bit of Canva engineering away.
| mort96 wrote:
| Hm? The Affinity Suite already works on Windows, which is
| realistically Apple's competitor in this space. The only
| platform moving to the web would enable is Linux and the BSDs,
| and while that would be great, I don't understand how you think
| it'd scare Apple?
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Sveikinimai!
| kazcaptain wrote:
| Big up to the team. Great work over the years.
| iamsanteri wrote:
| For how much?
| phtrivier wrote:
| >it's crazy what a small group of dedicated people have been able
| to achieve over the years from all the way in Vilnius, Lithuania
|
| Silly segway, but at least the codebase, IP (and maybe the dev
| team ?) might get somewhere safe to stay.
|
| Call me a Cassandra, but the situation in the Baltics is not
| guaranteed to be safe in the next few years, especially given the
| probable results from a certain election in a few days.
|
| Of course, "will that photo app keep getting upgrades ?" would be
| very, very low on the list of problems. But I'm honestly
| wondering if that kind of consideration played a part in the
| sell.
|
| Also, as usual for any acquisition: congrats to whoever gets to
| receive the money, sorry for whoever gets to use the product.
| sidcool wrote:
| What can Pixelmator be possibly doing that Apple cannot?
| thallavajhula wrote:
| This would be a great acquisition for Apple if they were to use
| the patents (if any) owned by Pixelmator and the team behind it
| to work on Apple's Photos app for the next year, now that Apple
| Intelligence is out in Beta.
| b3ing wrote:
| Adobe is going online as in Photoshop will be browser based in
| the future as they already have a beta version. The days you have
| an Adobe desktop app that sends data to the cloud will be over in
| probably 10yrs. Sure they will probably make an "local desktop
| app" the same way Figma does, but it won't be a true desktop app
| anymore.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Interesting, and congrats to the Pixelmator team.
|
| Why announce the acquisition before regulatory approval? I think
| I'd prefer to wait, but maybe it's because this could be
| publicized through other channels anyway?
| gregorymichael wrote:
| pixelmator's great. congrats!
| ilumanty wrote:
| Not surprising at all. Their website already looked like Apple.
|
| Jokes aside, this has been long overdue. Hope the products will
| survive somehow.
| tunnuz wrote:
| Excellent program, the only real competitor to Photoshop. I kinda
| liked that they were independent.
| instagraham wrote:
| Just curious but what makes a non-Photoshop photo-editor tool
| "good"? Aside from AI fill, it seems like the fundamentals of
| this space haven't changed much since CS6 for 90% of design
| usecases.
|
| If you have a workflow that includes InDesign, there's a lot of
| benefit to using Photoshop which a competing tool would have to
| be truly pathbreaking to defeat. For someone who's learning, it's
| hard to beat the YouTube resources there are on Photoshop.
|
| It seems that to truly beat Adobe, you'd need a suite at least as
| good as its own, one that is worth industry making the shift from
| decades-old workflows
| petarb wrote:
| Love the product, as a casual user of light photo editing it's
| allowed me to get rid of Adobe.
|
| I hope they integrate this as a free first class citizen into iOS
| and MacOS
| josefrichter wrote:
| Anything that helps avoid Adobe is more than welcome.
| palla89 wrote:
| I always loved pixelmator and they deserve it. 100% of it! Never
| greedy, ui and ux top notch and I never missed Photoshop once.
| I'm of course a little scared of its future but I hope Apple will
| just integrate it inside the new OS updates. Thank you Pixelmator
| team!!
| chipweinberger wrote:
| wow, something I know a lot about. I used to work on the Photos
| Edit team at Apple.
|
| I'm both surprised and not surprised.
|
| The built in edit tools evolved steadily every year, and the
| infrastructure was quite solid, having been rewritten from the
| ground up years prior.
|
| But as we've seen ML and competitors like google adding so many
| more features, I kept having the same thought "wow the Edit team
| must be super busy right now".
|
| I'm curious what features in Pixelmator they most wanted.
|
| But since it already integrates into Photos as a plugin, it will
| be extremely natural to integrate into the codebase.
|
| Cool move. Must be a fun time to be working on Edit!
| withoutshape wrote:
| ultimate goal when submitting to app store, congrats
| hyperbovine wrote:
| > We want to give a big thanks to our amazing users for your
| support over the past 17 years.
|
| Wow I feel old :)
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| There is a lot to do to make it more user friendly. That's where
| the first changes will be made if I have to guess.
| creativenolo wrote:
| Are they acquiring the company to get the app, or are they
| acquiring the company to hire the people?
| tomaskafka wrote:
| As a Pixelmator lover, I pray that Apple does not - kill it as
| they killed Aperture - slow down the development to a glacial
| pace 'enjoyed' by their other prosumer software
| petetnt wrote:
| Hopefully Apple doesn't ruin this, but I assume that it will be
| infested with Apple AI features sooner than later. Oh well, at
| least Pixelmator Pro is not a subscription service, so it will
| last me for a while even if that becomes the case.
| jitl wrote:
| Pixelmator already has plenty of "machine learning" features
| that work well.
| otterpro wrote:
| I bought Pixelmator nearly a decade ago for my Mac, when I needed
| a decent image/photo editor. I hope they make Pixelmator free, as
| mac definitely needs a good default image editor that is more
| advanced than Preview.
| ndgold wrote:
| I have owned pixelmator apps for years and love this decision
| putna wrote:
| Sveikinimai broliams ir visam kolektyvui!
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