Apple acquires Pixelmator
pixelmator.com
pixelmator.com
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.
(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.
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.
Is this something you just made up, or does this really happen? Colour me sceptical.
Of course, theories and the reality don't always match up.
First day of Econ 101.
If X consists of two complementary components, A and B, then if the price for either A or B goes down, then the total price for X goes down, demand for X goes up. Which means demand for A and B went up.
Even if the price of only one of A or B went down.
So if the price of A goes down, demand for B goes up.
If software prices go down, then demand for the hardware to run that software on goes up.
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.
One article from back in 2010: https://nofilmschool.com/2010/07/apple-snubs-adobe-again-wit...
The truth is that no matter how good of a player Adobe would be, Apple would still be trying to fuck them over because Apple's greed is infinite.
Adobe's switch to subscription pricing is very annoying, but at least it's not completely absurd compared to what you would pay previously if you bought the software outright and if you actually subscribe to the full package, you get much more value actually. And their competitors, while decent, are not really a replacement for professional work. Affinity is fine and all but after having used it a bit for a few projects, if I were to do it full time professionally, I would pay for Creative Cloud.
In comparison the extortionate pricing Apple practices on their RAM/storage upgrades is much worse.
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.
Most likely will be integrated into Photos or possibly even a new advanced photo editing app for macOS/iOS only.
I don't think it bodes well for the long term though, because Apple tend to not care much about stuff that don't make them a ton of money. It will probably become like their office apps, being updated at a glacial pace, used primarily as a marketing tool but never really reaching a level that would truly make them a worthwhile competitor.
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.
Apple’s main source of innovation is applying mafia tactics to software distribution.
Main source of innovation? What about the Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple watch, AirPods and M1 MacBook Air, all of which transformed their product categories? Not just because of the hardware, but also because of the hardware-software integration.
Even Apple's failed innovations (Apple Vision, etc.) are interesting products that push the envelope.
Also I think you’re overreacting with some of your examples there. You seem to be conflating “successful” with “innovative”. The two terms aren’t mutually inclusive.
If the app store is “mafia tactics”, I can’t even imagine how demonic things like wholesalers mist be.
Wether or not the 30% is proportional to the value you get by being on the App Store depends on your situation. That is why choice is a great thing.
This is missing from the conversation, is on average, smaller corporations can better keep via the App Store model vs the open software market, because it allows for focused marketing on a fair playing field
If you had put up your website back in the early 90's and were judicious about advertising back then, you might've been a Fortune 500 company (depending on your business niche, of course)!
Notarized Mac apps have to used the hardened runtime, which comes with a few restrictions. For now, there are no content restrictions for notarized apps on the Mac. Let's hope it stays that way. But there are very significant content restrictions for notarized apps on iOS, and who knows how long until Apple introduces them on macOS as well.
I haven't been an Apple user for over 10 years, through that macOS now uses the App Store to distribute OS updates. There is no getting around the App Store on macOS and must be used for Apple related software releases, such a Xcode.
The community that looks for applications not in the App Store is most likely quite low. It requires knowledge of the ability to side-load, how to do it, and where to find applications that can be side loaded. Homebrew installation ratio against total macOS users might be a good metric.
I have five apps that get regular updates via DMGs, two of which are unsigned and do not meet Apple’s sandbox requirements.
All I have to do is authorize them to install in settings.
You and I can agree on Apple’s App Store power and abuses, but you can still call MacOS a computer OS.
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.
In some other timeline, I am using a Mac w/ a current version of Macromedia Freehand running on Rhapsody and I am a _much_ happier person.
As it is, I'm about to give up on interactive vector drawing and just code everything either using METAPOST or OpenSCAD, or some mix of both.
Much larger than it should be for the ecosystem's sake. Excessive cannibalism isn't probably in Apple's interest even.
Adobe is extremely incompetent wrt actually developing usable, clean and efficient software so I can definitely see this as being plausible
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.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/53609-merg...
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/185759-sto...
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/166381-see...
If this is indeed an issue overall it would be very ironic because the Affinity suite of products are (as far as I understand) way more focused on and enable a non-destructive workflow than Photoshop and its related products. I think it's a big "if", though, no offense intended.
I sincerely have no idea what you're talking about.
The first linked thread is by a person who is doing pixel art. “I'm working on pixel art (very small-resolution bitmaps)”
The second thread you linked is also by a person doing pixel art. “I work on pixel art a lot”
This doesn’t take away from the fact that there’s a blurring issue happening that Affinity don’t seem to be able/willing to solve as of yet, just making it clear that you linked to two threads by people doing small bitmapped pixel art, then denied they had anything to do with 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.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oliviadam/dark-sky-hype...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190110174010/https://darksky.n...
On the other hand, does it help to worry? I don't think you can influence Apple.
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.
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.
Edit: and was trying to tie back to the original “Exploring is not wasted. Fretting is wasted.” comment.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Have you tried windows?
https://www.yr.no/en/details/graph/2-4887398/United%20States...
https://www.yr.no/en/details/table/2-4887398/United%20States...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It's also not impossible that Apple moves a few of Pixelmator's tools into Photos but kills the rest of it, either actively or just by stagnant development.
This is comparing apples to oranges. A better photos app isn't even remotely comparable to shipping a raster image editor. One is concerned with overall rendering of the products of a camera, the other is concerned with precise editing of a raster image.
If Pixelmator were to disappear then the value of the Mac platform would decrease. There is nothing that the Pixelmator team could do to the Photos app to make up for that.
There doesn't appear to be much overlap in terms of functionality.
Hell, if this is true I'd actively celebrate it.
When they make a focused effort in professional software, Apple can deliver.
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.
Even accepting this premise there's little reason to think Apple would have cared about this particular market before they bought Pixelmator. Why would you think Apple would target a given market segment?
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"?
Never understood the logic of getting rid of it. I know a few people who actually switched to mac because of Aperture
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2 DAN B. DOBBS, THE LAW OF TORTS §§ 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 § 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.").
You’ve asked two different questions. One about legality and the other about public perception. There are lots of things that are legal and still considered unethical. And there are lots of things that might or might not be legal, that businesses avoid simply because there’s legal risk, and/or avoid because there’s risk of negative perception.
If everyone involved in a startup agreed to be individually hired, and divest interest in the startup, and there was mutual understanding on all sides, then there may be reasonable chances of success and no lawsuits. I think that probably has happened before. If not everyone agreed to it, and a company tried to acquihire all the individuals of a company forcefully without agreement by the investors and founders, there’s a high likelihood (risk) of legal conflict, and the likelihood will increase under US law if the acquiring company would start to look anything like a monopoly on the market in question after the unofficial “merger”, right?
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
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
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.
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 :)
Seems like a great way to help out budding monopolies.
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.
And since when has a company’s reputation stopped them from doing business?
In the past decade these apps even disappeared from their main menu on Apple.com where they used to have a prominent spot.
Can you point to a newer acquisition of great software that is still being developed?
I’m not a power user, neither is my wife.. I don’t think it is all that well advertised.
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.
6 months they'll realize they can't fit in with Apple's culture and most of the team will hit the road.
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.
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.
- toggle the white point setting on or off to warm and dim the display for nighttime,
- present a menu that makes and displays QR codes for my contact (from vCard text), Wifi info, and more,
- turn off Wifi and cellular at the same time (this one's on my homescreen),
- upload a .torrent file to qBittorrent's watch folder via SSH.
I use Shortcuts at work, too, like sharing a Wifi network with visitors - easier than fiddling with settings and they can take a picture of the QR code to share with others in their party.
My favorite and most handy Shortcut took a picture of an order form, OCRed it, applied a regex to find the order #, and finally showed a QR code I could scan with my scanner; This was at a job where customers would come to pick up, and would often have their order email on their phone or as a printout. The Shortcut meant I could snap the photo first thing and then chit-chat in the time it took the Shortcut to run, instead of them passing their phone to me or reading out the number.
Shortcuts is one of the things that keeps me on iOS.
Out of curiosity - how is this different from enabling Airplane Mode?
Weird that it seems to be different for different people, though.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-my/guide/iphone/iphb771143ee/io...
• Turn off a particular smart plug
I use this in an automation that runs on my iPad. That automation is set to run when the battery charge goes above 80%.
My iPad charger is plugged into that smart plug, so this effectively gives me the 80% charge limit option that so far Apple has only added to the settings for iPhone 15 and 16, iPad Pro (M4), and iPad Air (M2). My iPad is a plain iPad.
• A series of shortcuts to control my Denon A/V receiver.
My receiver is from 2012, long before voice control was available. It does have network control (and serial port control). I've got a script on an RPi that can use the network control to change inputs, mute/unmute, and change the volume.
I've got shortcuts for mute, unmute, various volume levels, and getting the current settings for input, mute, and volume. They work by using the Shortcut action "Run script over SSH" to invoke the script on the RPi.
I've got an Amazon Echo Dot next to the Denon, with the line out of the Dot connection to one of the Denon analog inputs. When line out is connected to a Dot the internal speaker is disabled, which makes that Dot useless for things like checking the weather or timers unless the corresponding Denon input is selected, so I've got the mic on the Dot disabled and use an Echo Show in the same room for all those things. The Dot's job is strictly to supply input to the Denon.
So let's say I want to listen to some music. I can say "<Apple>, Denon Dot" to switch the input to the Dot. (I'm writing "<Apple>" instead of Apple's phrase to trigger their voice assistant so if anyone ever happens to run this through text to speech it will be less annoying. Similar for Amazon's voice assistant).
Then I can say "<Amazon>, on Dot listen to Classical KING FM on Dot" and the echo Show will start the Dot streaming KING FM to the Denon. (It is only actually necessary to say "on Dot" once, but which of the two is necessary occasionally changes, and it is easier to just say it twice).
• Open the "OTP Auth" app.
That's the app I use for TOTP codes on my iPhone. It supports Apple Watch, but asking Apple's voice assistant on the watch to "open OTP Auth" isn't reliable (maybe...[1]). My first choice alternative to voice would be a widget in the Smart Stack but OTP Auth does not have one.
Shortcuts can be put in the Smart Stack. Hence, a Shortcut on the watch that simply launches OTP Auth.
[1] I say maybe because that is based on my old Series 4 watch. I recently upgraded to a Series 10. That has on-device Siri, and I've noticed that is way better. It did not occur to me to check of "open OTP Auth" is reliable.
And there's a internet radio capability built in - you have to pay $20 or so a year for it but it should be easy enough to set up a competing service since it uses unencrypted HTTP - probably just a matter of reimplementing the protocol and then DNS redirect.
I did indeed look at the requests the browser made when on the receiver's web pages. I also used packet sniffing to see what the Denon app on my phone did.
I then wrote a simple web page that just showed current status, and had big buttons for the three sources I use, and for mute/unmute, and for several volume levels, and used JavaScript on that page to send requests to the receiver.
That's when I learned about CORS. The receiver does not send CORS headers, and browsers take that to mean that scripts running on pages that do not come from the receiver should be blocked from receiving any data back.
For the commands to change source, mute, and volume that was OK. They are simple GET requests with the change as query parameters. They could be done without triggering a CORS preflight check. Whether or not the browser blocked the response didn't matter.
Not so for getting status.
That's when I switched the approach from the web page using JavaScript to talk to the receiver to having it be a form and having the web server talk to the receiver. The web page source looked like this:
<?php
...a bunch of functions to control the receiver
...code to process the form and invoke those functions
?>
...the HTML for the web page
I just gave it a try, using the "Get Contents of URL" action to GET the URL http://ip_of_receiver/goform/formMainZone_MainZoneXml.xml and it worked. It gives back a blob of XML that includes the data I care about (source, mute, volume).
On my Mac I'd probably handle that by passing the XML off to a script to extract that data. I'm not sure how I'd do it on an iPhone or iPad.
There are commands to get individual data items such as the volume whose results might be easier to deal with, but I'm not sure they can be used from shortcuts. They are POST requests to /appCommand.xml, with the command (or commands if you want to batch commands) in XML in the body. For example to get the volume you post
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<tx>
<cmd id="1">GetVolumeLevel</cmd>
</tx>
Looks like I missed a more normal form interface.
Those fundamentally tend to butt against the OS limitations and benefit from becoming a blessed first party utility or feature.
Shake was acquired in 2002 and killed 7 years later.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040613170323/http://www.apple....
I would bet a million bucks that Jobs put that price in because he basically said well if they buy the Linux version we're down one Mac sale from them so charge them our profit margin on a Mac Pro.
> 4.8 star / 10.5M reviews
> 500M+ Downloads
> No data shared with third parties
It gives Apple the data/insights which new artists are getting popular. Maybe they can use it to negotiate prices with artists.
Although maybe they were on their last legs before the acquisition, and it led to multitouch being everywhere, so great outcome anyway.
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.
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.
You'd be hard pressed to find any more recent success stories.
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.
https://www.biv.com/news/technology/bye-bye-android-apple-ac...
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.
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.
This is typical here.
Once going on a hike with a friend we got stuck amid torrential rain which for 40 min pretty much affected a less than 1x1 km area centred on the bench (with a roof) where we sat down. We knew it from the radar, since all apps showed mostly sunny weather. I didn’t bring the umbrella since it was supposed to be sunny and estimated cumulative precipitation was insignificant—who knew it would all fall directly on our heads!
The radar won’t give you a forecast, but (if you are lucky to not get hit by weather developing on top of you) show you an animated map of where in town all hell is breaking loose now vs. where it was 15 min ago and you make your own conclusions. Newer versions of Weather app include a mini map of precipitation in some areas but I assume not all local radars agree to feed it their data, and even if some do the extra moving parts involved in getting and processing the data introduce too much of a lag for real-time weather developments. I doubt optimising that is Apple’s priority.
I enjoy a good poking fun at weather apps (back then Dark Sky, now Weather) as much as the next guy, which is exceedingly easy while you are in ITCZ, but the reality of fluid dynamics on this big rotating ball is such that some places worry about a cold front they can see coming days in advance while others live in weather that may develop within minutes right there and then. Guess in which of the two do most paying customers live!
The galaxy brain is to wear flip-flops and care less (or, if you are a local in Bangkok, move by car/wear one of those thin plastic raincoats, depending on your class).
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.
It's constantly saying it's not going to rain for hours, then I look out my window and it's raining at this very moment.
They would be better to dump any prediction model they use and just show the raw data sources as it would be more accurate.
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.
Development can stagnate. This isn't a huge trend with apple but it's the obvious answer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
It feels like the audio code was not touched since emagic days.
Every other modern DAW does this automatically. In Logic, you are expected to do this manually every time you do an audio edit. Like it's 2004 again.
Edit: added clarification about zero crossings and editing workflow
It's editing 101, check your cuts are at a safe boundry of put in a fade. I've never seen an auto feature do what I want though and need to redo it anyway, so just doing nothing is half as much work.
I would much rather complain about lack of AAF support in logic but then again I would never recommend logic to anyone other than for music production work purely because that's the only use case the devs seem to care about.
However when you zoom in in the Arrange the way the waveform is rendered it seems like you are cutting on a zero crossing when in fact you are not.
It lies to you and leads you to believe you've done the right thing.
I have had the pleasure of working on tracks with dozens of clicks that I had to remove thanks to the laziness of Logic developers, pardon me for dying on the hill and spoiling your view.
There's many things I disliked about logic when I tried it and that led to my opinion on its only useful for music production, I would probably not even say editing...
More on the composition level. If I'm tracking it's into Pro Tools, any edits happen there too. I personally don't move out but other's do really prefer to do more production work in Logic so I would happily bounce out tracks for them. Ironically AAF would solve that problem too...
Regarding cuts on zero... I basically never do so all my cuts will have a crossfade, generally the real world is just a little too chaotic to have a zero crossing just about where I would prefer the cut...
And if they don't well, more work for them.
Or just add it to the bill, if you are clear upfront that it will add $$$ there's no issues there.
I've had sessions rejected by mastering engineers for stuff that I've had to correct, why make this your problem.
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/
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?
I was pretty impressed, though, for approximately ten minutes start to finish. I should probably go recall what I played so I can try and finish the riffs off or something.
An actual competent musician ought to be able to make the most ridiculous demos with this thing.
The Pixelmator team did the same thing with "Pixelmator Classic".
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.
Like, Apple probably doesn’t even need to make money from any of FCP? IMO should be used for driving people to buy more hardware. It’s a little bit offensive for them to charge $5/month on top of a $300 Mac app.
On my Mac I have Davinci, and was considering perhaps trying FCP, but not at those prices / subscriptions.
How does that happen? Forgetting to periodically save their work and have the app crash, or was it saving incorrectly and producing corrupted files?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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?
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.
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.
I think they are both good though.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
So even if in theory a Mac could be good for video editing because of its software, for a young person, a Mac with enough storage to make this endeavor worthwhile pursuing is entirely out of his budget. In the meantime, this person can settle for a still pretty good PC that may not be as great but will allow him to have multi-terabytes of storage at a palatable price and he can just use DaVinci or a pirated copy of Premiere.
In some ways macOS has more users but they all tend to be for the "basic" consumer type which are OK with the base configuration Apple offers that are not completely out of whack from a value standpoint.
Apple may be realizing a bit late that while it does seem alright for money making, it doesn't make for halo products that give status and are aspirational. But then again Apple seems to be content just being a luxury brand that primarily gives status by making people appear "rich".
My sample size here is small, but yeah, from my horizon FCP is starting to look abandoned.
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 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.
They need something to handle that... and because it's Apple they won't use PowerPoint.
Apple have those things only to say they have them and pretend that they have "solutions" instead of having to rely on 3rd party. But they are not really competitive outside of the most basic need and in my opinion their existence is not worth all that much in today's landscape where both Microsoft and Google basic offering are free.
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 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.
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.
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.
Coda (by panic) was one that I remember vividly.
[0]: https://nova.app/
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.
It's also the reason I use the Affinity suite rather than Pixelmator.
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.
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.
I really hope Photomator/Pixelmator won't get absorbed into the Photos app, now knowing that Affinity has also been gobbled up :(
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).
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.
Maybe I’m in some sort of bubble.
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??
Statistically speaking there was no "most developers use this", but the closest OS offering was Windows at 45%.
Given Apple's poor performance on the OS side the past few years I'm not sure the hardware has managed to keep users on their side anyway; they even lost DHH very publicly not that long ago... So the numbers might be even worse now.
Edit:
In the latest StackOverflow survey 31.8% of developers report using MacOS (for personal and professional use), 57.9%/47.6% for Windows (personal/professional use). So both MacOS and Windows are eating into Linux's share at the moment, with Windows offering them to instead run Linux inside of Windows.
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.
They have already been acquired (by Canva) earlier this year.
and now Rive is really taking the 2D world by storm
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.
> What I typically hear is advertising is Premiere, Hollywood is Avid
Yes, for editing, but AFAIK Resolve is quickly becoming the king for grading.
> 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
It's true but OTOH many projects don't need all that sophistication and you can't beat the convenience of doing it all inside a single project/app (editing, grading, vfx, motion, sound).
I'd also emphasize that node-based compositing is more suited to VFX and layer-based compositing to motion graphics.
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.
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.
OTOH it could very well be that Apple intends to invest into Pixelmator and make it a pro app.
Time will tell.
It aligns better with my concept of an image editor, based on my experience with Photoshop 4.x-6.x and The Gimp.
Acorn strikes the right balance for me of simplicity vs richness of features.
Great work all around by Gus Mueller.
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).
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.
(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.
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.
Stay safe.
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-...
[1] Krita more as paint tool on my Lenovo Yoga, Gimp more as an editing tool on other computers.
As others here mentioned, Krita is also much nicer. If Pixelmator didn't exist it's probably what I'd use instead.
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.
Most time consuming part of development of old software is trying to go around limitations inherited from past decisions.
Congrats to the Pixelmator team!
RIP Macromedia Fireworks
Bringing a more premium experience to Photos would be a great complement to how you can already shell out to Pixelmator while editing photos.
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.
I still don't see where it fits into the lineup. If there's still a PixelMator Pro in 6 months, I'll be surprised, but it won't be the first time I'm completely wrong about something.
Being able to put Shortcuts into Control Center in iOS 18 is a handy option, if anyone missed that you can do that now.
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.
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.
Great point for Windows. iOS, Mac, and Linux evolve too much to reliably run 10 year old binaries.
We are talking photoshop anyway so it isn't relevant in that case.
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.