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Comment by lowkey_ | Hacker News Reader

I'd never heard of Pixelmator before (congrats to them on the exit), and:

WOW their website already looks like an Apple website. The colors, the font, the logo with the same colors as Apple Photos, all the images that show a Mac window, the shade of red in the top right, the "machine learning" section that almost looks like Notes, and I scrolled down and it's all about how great Mac is.

It seemed inevitable that Apple would either acquire or copy them, with how much this already looks like an Apple product, and is exclusively made for Mac apparently.

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I am a Pixelmator Pro user and this move does not surprise me. The app has a very "first party, use MacOSX the way it is supposed to be used" feel to it and their website has always looked a lot like Apple's. I can't imagine them ever wanting to port the code to another OS.

I purchased Pixelmator Pro years ago. I think I bought it for half price in a sale but even at the current listed price of $50 it is a steal. I am in not way a pro image editor but it has done everything I needed it to.

This follows through into the app, which itself is a good demonstration for how a developer can tightly follow design guidelines while extended them with their own originality.

This is generally a good thing for users - building a unique UX for every app doesn't service the user. Some naively believe this is vanity, but no single app lives in isolation, so having all apps generally act and function similarly makes it very easy to pick up a new app and hit the ground running. Yes it also looks nice when all the apps look like they're from the same package, but that's not why we do it.

Something that stuck with me in the 90s was this description of the mac experience: "when you've learned one app, you've learned 80% of another". I bought Pixelmator and started using it immediately without any reference material, tutorials or videos, it is a 10/10 in quality software development.

It's not that unique—a lot of Apple-ecosystem developers take heavy inspiration from Apple's design language.

Back before I switched to mac’s, the visual quality of applications for OSX vs Windows was night and day.

Coda (by panic) was one that I remember vividly.

Coda’s successor Nova[0] continues the tradition.

[0]: https://nova.app/

It makes sense to me now, waving the same colour flag makes you allies, so to speak. Or money.

It's a really nice app, I use it all the time. Definitely feels like the sort of app Apple would have made themselves.

Pixelmator has also been app store-only, and I prefer Mac apps that are downloadable from the company's website. This is probably another example of them posturing themselves for acquisition by Apple.

It's also the reason I use the Affinity suite rather than Pixelmator.

They've been in the Mac app store for 13 years.

I used to be their web developer 10 years ago. Yes, it was always their goal to be like Apple. The apple aesthetic, pixel perfect websites, smooth transitions, similar fonts etc.

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