Team behind Mac image editor Pixelmator plays David to Adobe's Goliath (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Team behind Mac image editor Pixelmator plays David to Adobe's Goliath (2015)

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95 pointsbreck38 comments

I think Affinity is closer to being David vs Adobe's Goliath.

With existing Windows / Mac vector and pixel tools, and a forthcoming Digital Asset Management (1) tool like Adobe Lr, they can take on Ai, Ps, and Lr.

I've been enjoying Lr for years but am turned off by Adobe's subscription cloud pricing model. The standalone hasn't been updated with features in quite some time. I think Adobe needs some competition.

(1) https://affinity.serif.com/forum/index.php?/topic/13981-digi...

I found when I switched to Affinity I was able to drop PS completely. I even had good luck working with client supplied PS files, though I didn't need to return the supplied files, just create a derivative deliverable.

One odd side effect of this is I'm more disappointed in Affinity when it doesn't do something as well as PS, whereas with the other tools I'd write it off to their smaller scope an size.

I purchased Pixelmator a long time ago, but have never actually used it. I bought it to do web graphics, but their UI doesn't really speak to me. I've never cared for the floating docks like GIMP uses.

Affinity Designer has allowed me to not miss Photoshop/Illustrator at all. It came out right as I was thinking of buying a Mac and switching to Swift development. Saving the monthly Adobe fees helped me justify the cost of a Mac.

Also, the new Symbols stuff in Affinity Designer makes it useful for doing mockups. I haven't tried the layout constraint stuff they added.

For mockups I think Sketch is still easier/faster, but only barely. And it is kind of limited in what you can do, while Affinity Designer isn't. It's made me want to invest the time into getting good with Affinity Designer, since it's so powerful and fast. The buy once thing is also nice - I think paying monthly for desktop software is mostly bullshit.

Sorry for the long rambling, I just really want to praise Affinity. When I see that there's an update I actually get excited, and they keep adding non-trivial features. It's how I wish other software companies worked. I hope they do well and can continue with their current business model.

I might just have to give this a try. Looking at the Affinity site it's the first Adobe alternative that I have seen with Pantone support. Critical for the print world. Now if it plays nice with RIP's...

Pixelmator is definitely the wrong tool for web graphics. It is much more focused on image editing. I tried to use it as a PS sub like you. Eventually i moved to Sketch and it has been great.

This is true. I enjoy using it for basic editing/painting but it lacks the depth of general image manipulation tools.

I agree - although I think Affinity (and Sketch and Pixelmator) might not necessarily displace Adobe's design apps, but rather dent their market share.

What's nice about the Affinity apps:

- they are cross-platform: Windows and Mac (unlike Sketch and PixelMator)

- they are not subscription-based (like Adobe)

- they cover vector (Affinity Designer), Raster (Affinity Photo) and DTP (still-to-be-released app)

- they are much more affordable than an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription

- they feel faster and much less bloated than Adobe's apps

However, the sheer amount of tutorials and design assets available for Adobe apps means that Adobe will remain popular. And there are some apps like After Effects that simply don't have any serious rivals.

Do you have any details about the DTP app?

No screenshots or feature list for the DTP app (called Publisher) have been released yet.

Here is a post from the Affinity forums from October 2016 from one of the Serif staff on the current state of the app:

https://affinity.serif.com/forum/index.php?/topic/26715-why-...

btw, do I have to purchase mac and Windows versions separately?

Yes, separate licence for each platform.

> forthcoming DAM

Your thread is 2015. From Affinity a couple months ago:

"I'm not able to give any definitive timeline as they are details I am not privy to. Personally I would not expect to see it in 2017, but that does not mean things might not change."

https://affinity.serif.com/forum/index.php?/topic/25835-digi...

This mirrors my complaint exactly - I belatedly upgraded to CC after holding off for as long as possible simply because I receive a lot of files from clients, which were increasingly opening 'badly' (poor PDF conversions, etc).

So I've paid for CC for three years now.. and for what? The feature set I require beyond file compatability was served by my old CS2 peograms - it's nearly a decade since Adobe added anything relevant to me.

It's a business expense so not the end of the world, but I'm in the UK so pay as much for two apps as Americans pay for the entire suite,and I'm embittered toward Adobe, feeling like I'm just being bilked every month.

Sod their subscription model.

I've invested in Affinity's windows offering, even though they're not terrifically useful to me (I use illustrator like its CAD) simply to help the competition Adobe so very much needs.

I pay for Photoshop right now, so I'm not above paying for Affinity if it handles that usecase for me, now that it's available for Windows. I'm disappointed that there's no trial that I can see, but it's inexpensive enough I might dive in anyway.

I bought Affinity Designer for Windows on impulse (at $30 I was happy enough to swap a night out for a TV dinner), and I was impressed enough that I bought Photo sight unseen the day it came out for Windows. Within about two weeks they'd eliminated about 90% of my need for Photoshop (only a few particularly plugin-heavy workflows are left) and all of my need for Illustrator.

The only Adobe product I keep around is InDesign, and only because I was fortunate enough to get CS6 before permanent licensing ended. Affinity Publisher seems to forever be at least a year out and no alternative I've tried can do everything I need InDesign to do, much less with the same efficiency.

How is Affinity Photo's RAW support for new devices? The supported camera list link from their website[1] says 08 February 2015. I'm not familiar with their forum so am not sure if it's ever edited since that date, but there are certain new-ish cameras missing from the list. If they don't update RAW support for new cameras, that will be a big bummer. (Lr standalone version at least updates RAW support frequently)

[1] https://affinity.serif.com/forum/index.php?/topic/4630-suppo...

Haven't tried Pixelmator, but for the past 7 or so years, Acorn has been very useful to me for most of the same stuff I would have used Photoshop for.

http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/

I'll second that recommendation; it really is top notch. Loads of tutorials/documentation on the website as well.

I love the Pixelmator UI, but it's severely lacking in some basic features. For example – it can't even open or import an SVG file, in spite of having an entire "Vectormator" mode.

I snagged Pixelmator for I think $15 at the time, well worth the price, as it's a pretty solid editor. However I spent most of my time in Capture One these days. It does basically everything anyone would want to do to a photo, without the super processing available in a Photoshop type app.

Pixelmator is also fairly nice and relatively capable on an iPad. Just wish they would add support for 16-bit images and wide color on iOS.

What does "[flagged]" prefix in the title mean?

It means enough users have flagged the submission that it's been marked "[flagged]".

Pixelmator is great - I use it all the time for basic image editing. It's so much snappier. On startup pixelmator is like 'yep!', whereas ps is like me getting out of bed in the morning - it takes a while and there's a lot of grumbling.

I like what Gravit.io has done for an online app it's my go to for getting anything out on Twitter fast ( quick templates). I read somewhere Gravit started out as the old Macromedia Freehand base code - don't quote me on this one. Go kick the tires , they also have YouTube videos up. ps. I have also used Affinity Designer beta it was fast and I liked it. I have also used Affinity's lighter weight InDesign software X8 an that worked well for an ebook / PDF.

And it's going to have a David-size market share until they make a Windows client as well.

I don't think the "but our program is so fine-tuned for the Mac!" excuse is going to cut it anymore. Other competitors will build a Windows app, too, and they will be the ones to actually eat Adobe's lunch. And who knows how much Apple will even care about macOS in the future, so Pixelmator may already be looking at a decreasing market share in the future.

I remember Deluxe Paint for DOS and the Amiga before Photoshop existed.

I also remember Quark Express.

Somehow Adobe ran them out of business or at least trying to compete with them.

It was Quark that lost the game for themselves, mostly. Hubris and bad timing.

Quark was really expensive, didn't support transparency (had to make shadows and overlays in PS and import in as TIFFs), and they totally botched the OSX transition with v5 which was again expensive and buggy.

Adobe releasing Creative Suite which worked on OSX and cost less than the new version of Quark, meant it was a no-brainer considering you still needed photoshop and acrobat anyway.

In its defence, Quark was really snappy - something Indesign has never matched.

It was Quark that lost the game for themselves, mostly. Hubris and bad timing.

That was my impression, too. Kinda sad.

Quark was really snappy

I remember QuarkXPress 3.32 being snappy; v4 seemed more sluggish, if memory serves. Moved from v4 to InDesign.

Oh, boy. This is bringing back memories of system crashes. That's been a while.

Not only was Quark Express expensive, had had enforced incompatibility between point versions. So if you had a news room with 20 copies of 3.3.2 and employed a new person and 3.3.3 was out, you had to spend thousands on updating everyone else.

I'm genuinely interested at your/anyone's analysis as to why Adobe has run out all its competitors for the last 20 years. I understand the "Everyone requires PSD files", but did Adobe have a major advantage? Did they have specific prices as some time to gain adoption? Did they draw out the competitors' best engineers?

Adobe branches out into many different types of software for Windows and the Mac. They have more than just Photoshop.

As I recall they gave a good student discount for education that the other competitors did not do. Once you get the students hooked on it, they beg their employers to buy it for them so they can use their skills on it. Also Adobe had Acrobat Reader, Shockwave, Flash and other free apps that would get people to their website and order Photoshop or the full package.

Deluxe Paint was only for Amiga, DOS, and a few other platforms. It was used mostly for video games and designing graphics on it. Electonic Arts had it along with Game Construction games and other things.

Quark was faster than Photoshop but cost more, Adobe had basically undercut them even if it wasn't as snappy as Quark could be.

Paint.Net and The Gimp are too free/open source alternatives to Photoshop but can't match PS' filters and other things like plug-ins.

In doing a bundle, Adobe did what Microsoft did for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc and made it into an Offie Suite.

It really does not matter what company had a product out first, what matters is being able to bundle to lower the price, innovate, and offer a student discount, etc to get more customers.

I used an Amiga 1000 with Deluxe Paint, it was fun, and did what I wanted it to do. It might have been out before Photoshop, but once Photoshop had plug-ins and filters and other stuff, it basically out-innovated Deluxe Paint and others. Then undercut them in price by bundling software.

> but did Adobe have a major advantage?

Basically, piracy. They've tolerated cracks and keygens all over the place up until CS6 (it always was just a keygen plus a couple entries in /etc/hosts) - which were mostly used by school kids who literally grew up using only Adobe products and so demanded Adobe products during their educational and professional life too. "Get 'em hooked while they're young" is a business strategy that can work very good.

Deluxe paint! Guybrush

Easy to see why quark lost. In design had full color, on screen layout with pictures while quark had this ugly, difficult to use mess that put boxes with Xs in them denote where your picture would be and had some weird feature to show a terrible reproduction of the image like a rendering that had poor performance and may have been black and white only if I can remember correctly. This was long after wysiwyg editing was extremely common place in consumer software.

Pixelmator is still trying to catch up to Windows paint.net and is still not even close.

Care to elaborate please?

Really? The last time I checked out Paint.NET it didn't even support alpha channels and masks; or at least it required a janky plugin to do it and a sort of pre-made channel bitmap. It was awful. Has this improved?

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