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.
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.
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.
One article from back in 2010: https://nofilmschool.com/2010/07/apple-snubs-adobe-again-wit...
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.
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.
During the PPC-Intel transition, Adobe compatibility was almost a running joke. Along the lines of the infamous "You can always count on [..] to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities] quote.
I was surprised at how quickly Adobe adopted aarch - it didn't feel sour.
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.
Much larger than it should be for the ecosystem's sake. Excessive cannibalism isn't probably in Apple's interest even.
(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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.biv.com/news/technology/bye-bye-android-apple-ac...
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.
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.
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.
Shake was acquired in 2002 and killed 7 years later.
Although maybe they were on their last legs before the acquisition, and it led to multitouch being everywhere, so great outcome anyway.
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"?
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.
The "ideas" in pixelmator are mostly updating traditional image-mutation patterns to match the native environment language. Let's not pretend that this was some kind of revolutionary application for image development.
Is it implemented well? Absolutely. But this is hardly an example of developing new software practices or processes.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When Microsoft bought GitHub it actually seemed like GitHub started working more on developing their product, but this quickly turned into essentially starting to do the same busywork every other big tech company does with lack of quality control, pointless reshuffling of UI components in places, embarrassing deficiencies in what should be obvious and exposed places.
So, on a long enough time frame even (observed positive) promising acquisitions seem to turn into bad deals.
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.
6 months they'll realize they can't fit in with Apple's culture and most of the team will hit the road.
We've already seen Affinity switch into releasing a "v2" after years of updates, and on the other hand hobby apps like LightTricks get far more out of their subscription services, despite being a consumer grade template-based app.
As for how it will be run. I'm guessing that Apple will just be their backer like they do for Claris. I don't imagine a MacPaint style app returning to macOS, but sharing code between the two to enhance mark-ups, the photos app and the like seems likely.
For random conjecture: this may also mean Pixelmator grows into the AR space.
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.
A minority of people will always prefer to use competing products, if for nothing but sentimental reasons. That’s fine, as such market will always exist.
Pixelmator was a successful team with a polish product and happy customers. What Apple brings to the table is money I guess, but was that a critical issue the company was facing ?
The talent could bring a lot of good to other Apple products, but I guess Pixelmator as a product has reached its peak at this point.
On the other hand, does it help to worry? I don't think you can influence Apple.
Development can stagnate. This isn't a huge trend with apple but it's the obvious answer.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oliviadam/dark-sky-hype...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190110174010/https://darksky.n...
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.
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.
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.
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.
How does that happen? Forgetting to periodically save their work and have the app crash, or was it saving incorrectly and producing corrupted files?
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.
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.
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.
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.
My sample size here is small, but yeah, from my horizon FCP is starting to look abandoned.
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.
It’s kinda wild that macOS bundles Garage Band but doesn’t come with anything for graphics.
I guess a lot of the editing has since moved to the photo-taking device (and the early iPhones/iPads lacked the processing power), but is that the cause or effect?
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.)
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.
I would disagree on that, at least about Keynote. I’m not the only one who loves it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Marketing is not the same as promotion
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.
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.
This is generally a good thing for users - building a unique UX for every app doesn't service the user. Some naively believe this is vanity, but no single app lives in isolation, so having all apps generally act and function similarly makes it very easy to pick up a new app and hit the ground running. Yes it also looks nice when all the apps look like they're from the same package, but that's not why we do it.
Something that stuck with me in the 90s was this description of the mac experience: "when you've learned one app, you've learned 80% of another". I bought Pixelmator and started using it immediately without any reference material, tutorials or videos, it is a 10/10 in quality software development.
It's also the reason I use the Affinity suite rather than Pixelmator.
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.
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.
While I like the idea of the affinity products, I don’t like using them much. Probably just me but I find them quite clunky and have to look up how to do simple things in the guides. Never quite clicked at an intuitive level.
Whereas Pixelmator seems to fit directly into my muscle memory and I’ve never had to think about how to achieve something with it. Maybe because it’s so Mac-like.
Plus the team have consistently released big new features for it over the years, making it outstanding value for money.
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).
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.
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.
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.
It aligns better with my concept of an image editor, based on my experience with Photoshop 4.x-6.x and The Gimp.
Great work all around by Gus Mueller.
Acorn strikes the right balance for me of simplicity vs richness of features.
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!
Didžiausi sveikinimai!
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.
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.
And such a natural fit of acquirer. This makes total sense and I'm excited to see what comes out of this!
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.
*Actually now that I think about it, I don't seem to miss the lack of History in vector editors (and just use undo).
There's plenty of free alternatives like rawtherapee, I guess Apple's marketing style really does work. Hmmm, taking note.
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.
Photomator finally added support for managing libraries outside of iCloud and this is exactly what I want. Sure, Photos can handle RAW files, but I don't want giant RAW images getting mixed with casual shots from my iPhone.
Pixelmator is one of the few remaining pro-image editing apps that can be quickly opened for simple, but also serious image work. Affinity got acquired by Canva, now Pixelmator is with Apple. What does that leave us with?
Photomator has shown that you can add a lot of professional-level editing control to an Apple-Photos-like interface without making it difficult to use.
Their ML team also seems quite good — for instance, their spot/object removal tool was often more reliable for me than the one in Lightroom, despite being from a far smaller team than Adobe.
(I also feel that Photoshop has reduced in cultural significance in recent years, and that Lightroom is the more significant tool going forward, but that could reflect my own bubble)
Curious if anybody has a good “combined” editor to suggest.
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
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?
Really looking forward to what comes out of this.
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-...
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.
I had access to Photoshop for years before that, but the UI always pushed me away, with too big a hurdle just to get started. Pixelmator got me over that hump, and I never looked back.
It's a great product that I use pretty much daily. I hope Apple runs with it and does great things.
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.
Congrats to the Pixelmator team!
RIP Macromedia Fireworks
Fireworks really was it though.
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.
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.
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.
I hope they integrate this as a free first class citizen into iOS and MacOS
I can never forgive them for making creative cloud such a stupid expensive subscription.
And why would Apple even want it? It's not like they buy every successful image editing (or otherwise) software out there, they have their self-contained ecosystem and I'd assume any new purchase would strive to enhance that.
Jokes aside, this has been long overdue. Hope the products will survive somehow.
> 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.
Wow I feel old :)
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.
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
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)
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.
