Apple has decided to compete for creativity app users
alex4d.com
alex4d.com
Directors hire on random ideas all the time and then pivot as needed
A single job posting for an engagement team in Poland.
Just like Amazon posting for this position in Phoenix wouldn't be seen the same way as Seattle.
Out of all the places in Poland, this choice is pretty strange. :)
It’s not some “paper HQ” for tax purposes, either - they have over 6000 employees there and are easily the largest private employer in Cork.
I will turn down the snark a little more in the future. Sometimes it just sneaks in there. Sneaky snark.
Apple is unusually centralized (they don’t even have different business units; the company has a single balance sheet at P&L) and corporate level decision making is pretty much all done by the same small team at the mother ship.
So while all sorts of decisions are made locally, a hire outside Cupertino (which all of Poland happens to be) is extremely unlikely to signal a corporate shift.
Even a job ad for a role in Los Angeles would be equally unlikely to signal such a shift.
¹ https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/index.html ² https://www.gentlemencoders.com/about/
It’s unfortunate there’s not a real Illustrator equivalent; Pixelmator has okay enough vector editing and export support for my needs, but notably will render the canvas rasterized at whatever the nominal resolution is even when zoomed in editing an SVG. Vector exports work as expected, just the editing is rasterized. Still, a small price to pay for not paying monthly for Adobe’s mountain of crufty malware.
I can’t say that would’ve been a perfect outcome all things considered, but Apple certainly would’ve had a well rounded creative suite.
The fact that it is impossible to get Pixelmator Pro outside the bundle just makes the situation more ridiculous, unless you want the legacy version.
Create serious pro/prosumer tools for creative verticals again (Aperture, you are dearly missed) and you'll have my attention.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to work in an Apple-sized rounding error.
(I was badly affected by that and decided not to trust them to maintain anything over the long term anymore)
Update: I now re-read the job posting and also realized that none of the responsibilities listed there are good for the users. This is bad news.
"MotionVFX, a Warsaw-based company"
Though I think you can buy them if you prefer.
I never boarded the Figma train because I prefer the UI of Sketch, as well as its local-first approach and how its file format is publicly documented so I actually own my data. I do worry about it going under though, and if Apple buying it up is the only way for that to happen so be it.
If nothing else it'd keep it out of Adobe's hands which is worth a lot on its own.
I'm not sure what the value proposition of Sketch is these days apart from local, non-cloud editing (although you can even get that with a pretty decent UI these days with Lunacy).
There are also platforms which are less vibe-friendly, and old style mockups can still be useful when nailing down a design system across platforms.
I’ve been in this trap before and I’m only interested in portable, documented, non subscription stuff.
I’ve moved to Darktable, Inkscape and libreoffice here mostly for my needs. I don’t really need photoshop equivalent.