Putting concerns about future states aside, congrats to the Pixelmator team. I've been using the app for years and it's a really great piece of software, well designed and well built. It's always been incredible value for the price, especially given that it basically replaces Photoshop for a wide swath of the market without compromising on UX (which is a problem for other competitors) at a price point that's like 1-2 months of an Adobe subscription (I don't even know exactly what that costs any more because Pixelmator + parts of the Affinity suite got me out of their clutches).
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.
I suspect this move is due to behind the scenes Adobe / Apple relations souring over the years.
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.
Creative software and macbooks are complement goods. i.e., demand for macbooks goes up when creative software gets cheaper, and vice versa.
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.
It’s a reframing of vertical integration, which does lead to lower prices or higher value assuming reasonable competition. You can also think of it as disintermediation (“cutting out the middleman”).
I mean theoretically that makes sense? If you get more value for something it increases the chance of buying it? But I also have no idea if this statement is true.
Apple and Adobe have always had a sour relationship. Adobe's crappy font licensing led to truetype and they're crappy implementation of Flash led to Jobs dropping flash in the iPhone just to mention a few things from their history.
Not to mention the fact that there were tons of rumors around Apple developers practically handholding adobe to get them across the finish line for the Apple Silicon port.
Adobe is extremely incompetent wrt actually developing usable, clean and efficient software so I can definitely see this as being plausible
… didn’t Apple switch away from Nvidia, push for OpenCL and keep Adobe in the rain when their new release was all super optimized for Nvidia? And I think heavily push for their proprietary video and image editing software? But Adobe rewrote its codebase and had the better product after all. And that was 15+ years ago?
I don't think so. Mac sales have only grown and the whole "you need a Mac for creative work" hasn't been a thing since the 00's.
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.
There are lots of amateur photographers out there that use Apple hardware yet so far Apple only monetizes storage. I wouldn't be surprised to see a subscription offering that includes pro tier features for Photos.app good enough to replace Lightroom for enthusiasts but not for actual professionals.
99% chance it will not stay alive for more than 1-2 years. Shazam is the only Apple acquisition I know of that still exists independently, and that's only because it promotes Apple Music on Android.
Most likely will be integrated into Photos or possibly even a new advanced photo editing app for macOS/iOS only.
Not to mention Apple's challenge with 30% AppStore tax for subscription revenue.
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.
But macOS requires app notarisation. They again made it harder to run un-notarised apps this year. If you look at the iOS side, it's clear that Apple has no qualms adding content restrictions for app notarisation, and it is more than just a malware check. It could be just a question of time until Apple decides to stop notarising Mac apps that do not use App Store payments.
Notarization isn’t the same, it just requires you have a developer certificate. There’s no restrictions on notarized apps that I’m aware of. It allows Apple to pull the cert if the app is found to be malware.
> There’s no restrictions on notarized apps that I’m aware of.
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.
Meh, Apple might be a little ahead of others, but all mainstream OSes and stores are basically headed this direction already. It’s just part modern security, part quality control, and part family & work friendliness. Most people on both sides actually want a walled garden. There will probably always be ways to run unsigned code and to get content that’s not approved by an app store, but maybe it’s fine if it’s ‘harder’ and not the default.
Yeah Windows does the same thing. It's something indie game devs run into. If you release on Steam, Steam launches your game. Otherwise you have to pay a certificate authority to sign your game or Windows Smart Screen will do the same "this code is sketchy. Are you really really really sure you want to run it?" thing MacOS does for non-notarized apps.
Didn't know what Pixelmator was, looked them up and they only distribute through the App Store.
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.
You do not need to download Xcode via MAS, you can download the disk image directly from their developer website. Going through the MAS has been historically very painful for that big app and the day it is the only option is the day I probably stop using it unless they make some changes.
> 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.
I don’t think you’re reading the GPs point very charitably. They’re clearly talking about recent innovations that generate revenue.
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.
As a software developer who made good money reaching hundreds of thousands of people through the app store where the old “put up a website and buy advertising” model might have netted me single-digit thousands of sales, I am always surprised at the white knights telling me I got no value from paying 30% of revenue.
If the app store is “mafia tactics”, I can’t even imagine how demonic things like wholesalers mist be.
The issue with the App Store model is that it's just another platform to market yourself on. In your case, you benefitted from a first-mover (or early-mover) advantage and did well. Over time the App Store becomes more and more saturated with apps and so the value to developers goes down. This is no different from the web! It's merely offset by a few decades.
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)!
Big corporations get less benefits than small ones.
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
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.
My recollection is that Adobe was slow to migrate from 32-bit to 64-bit x86 because they were still dependent on many of the Carbon APIs (Mac OS 9 compatibility) and those APIs weren't carried over to 64-bit. They dragged their heels about transitioning to Cocoa (NeXT derived) APIs for their UI, and it showed.
It still kills me that Altsys/Aldus/Macromedia let their NeXT codebase for Altsys Virtuoso whither (v2 was essentially Freehand 4 w/ a couple of unfixed bugs) so that when Rhapsody was announced they weren't ready for it.
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.
In general, the way a walled garden wins is by providing everything its villagers need inside.
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.
Assuming you're right, the vertical platform vendors should consider having a public Sherlocking policy. If you're anywhere near Apple's stuff, the Pixelmator outcome is a large fraction of your upside.
Much larger than it should be for the ecosystem's sake. Excessive cannibalism isn't probably in Apple's interest even.
Bet Apple eyes at the rent that Adobe extracts out of all those subscriptions and wants the same thing for itself. Apple has been in the market of renting out content for decades (starting with iTunes) and this move means people will have less options, not more.
Bingo. Uncommon for a company Apple's size, but they are trying to Innovators Dilemma Adobe. Either by releasing a pro version of Photos.app or adding pro features to Photos they will continue to move up the value chain into Adobes market of LR/PS. Adobe charges $20/month for the LR/PS bundle. If Apple can add some of the prosumer functionality and say increase Apple One by $5, they shift some of the subscription revenue over to them.
I can’t even remember how long have I been a Pixelmator and then Pixelmator pro user. I tried it once and I knew I would never go back to Photoshop again. An incredible bang for the price as well! Congrats to the Pixelmator team, and hoping for a bright future for their product. Fingers crossed though!
I used to use Pixelmator when I was on a mac. Its great for what it does, but its much much more limited than photoshop. Frankly most people don't need Photoshop. The UI is intuitive enough. I'm on linux now but missed that "preview" app for format/size conversions.
(It has a fun mosaic tool that lets you take a bit of an image and tile it real time which is really fun).
>Adobe must not be stoked about this news
Probably any mac developer should be a little worried. Apple has a mixed history at best with these applications. They had a lightroom competitor (Apeture?) they just dropped out of the blue. (some photographers are still griping) The "final cut pro" upgrade made people start using adobe again. But apple seem to keep the music making stuff going.
Frankly adobe Shold actually port their stuff to linux. The "free" competition is getting good (Krita, Blender, Gimp...). I have a couple pieces I used Gimp to layer together going into a gallery next week. Frankly its different, but pretty good once you get used to the UI.
I don't know how long ago that was, but I've been a Pixelmator user for at least a few years, and it's leaps and bounds ahead of where it was when I started with it. Coupled with Photomater -- its cousin app -- they're certainly starting to give Photoshop a real run for its money in many ways. Of course, not all ways, at least not yet, but I have personally used it for everything from photo touchups to marketing collateral to art elements later incorporated in a range of things including print layouts and videos. Once in a while I bump my head on a missing or incomplete feature that I was surprised to find not yet implemented, but its getting rarer by the month.
Pixelmator + parts of the Affinity suite got me out of their clutches
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?
I gave up on Affinity Photo after discovering that it degrades images as you edit them. Specifically, it blurs entire layers when you merge them. And it does so over and over, making the base layer worse each time. Therefore you can't trust it with your images. Affinity has refused to fix this, making excuses instead. Example here: https://youtu.be/QA8eVWOLL5I
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.
Here are a few threads from the forums; there are probably more. The first seems the most extensive. To be fair, I'm not sure if there are employee responses in there or just eager apologists ignoring evidence and blaming other users for the defective behavior:
The first thread is large, for sure, but is it relevant? Why do all of these have to do with pixel art, which is something you probably should do in a pixel art editor (Aseprite[0] is great, cheap and deserves your support)?
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.
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.
On the other hand, Testflight has a pretty good acquisition story. It got "merged into main" and is now a first class citizen of the iOS development ecosystem. Workflow being acquired and turning into Shortcuts is a pretty successful outcome IMHO. Beats still continues to make slightly cheaper headphones. FoundationDB is still there.
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.
BuddyBuild was acquired by Apple and used for their server CI platform, almost immediately cutting off Android support. That was a shame because it was a great platform for Android builds.
I wish every acquisition improved the end product as much as Workflow's did. All Apple's OSes got better for embracing it. I can write and have written AppleScript things, but Shortcuts is a vastly more convenient UX for the things it's good at.
I think the crucial different is Workflow was targeted at what Apple should have been doing from the start. I see it the same way Karabiner, BarTender or QuickSilver (DropBox?) improve the OS experience in ways the platform owner would ideally could have figured out on their own.
Those fundamentally tend to butt against the OS limitations and benefit from becoming a blessed first party utility or feature.
Let's see, I have 157 shortcuts defined at the moment. That wasn't due to some mass effort, just a bunch of little things that accumulated over time.
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.
I have tons that solve small annoyances or paper over things I forget. As an example, I listen to an audiobook in audible many nights to sleep, but I often forget to set the sleep timer. Very annoying to have to scrub back hours to find the last thing you remember. I have a shortcut that activates when my iphone is in sleep focus that automatically sets the audible sleep timer for me. It's a little thing, but it's a great quality of life improvement and eliminates my need to think about sleep timers.
- 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.
According to an help article by Apple [1], if you activate wifi or bluetooth during airplane mode, it will remember that and not disable those when you use airplane mode again.
I was also surprised reading your comment as for my phone wifi and bluetooth stay on during airplane mode. I must've activated them once and then it just stayed like that ever since.
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.
As a fellow 2012 Denon owner (AVR 3313) you can probably remove the RPi and just use HTTP. Just use devtools on your browser to do an action in the web UI and see what request it sends, then replicate it in shortcuts.
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.
What I originally wanted was just a better web interface. Mine is an AVR 1913, and the web page served by the receiver is kind of slow. The shortcuts came later.
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
Later when I realized being able to control the receiver from shortcuts would be nice, it was a simple matter to copy the web page source, delete the HTML, replace the form processing with command line processing, and have a command line script for controlling the receiver, and then use the run script via ssh shortcut action to invoke it. It never even occurred to me to consider issuing the commands directly to the receiver from the shortcut.
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
The "Get Contents of URL" action does support POST, but the only options it gives for the post data are JSON, Form, and File. For JSON and Form you give it name/type/value triplets and have no direct control of how the post data is formatted. Maybe file would work to get the XML the receiver wants sent but it probably won't have the right content type. I have no idea if the receiver would be OK with that.
> Beats still continues to make slightly cheaper headphones. FoundationDB is still there.
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.
Note how most of them are from the era when Apple cared about software, especially pro software. And how Siri is a barely functioning stagnant service.
You'd be hard pressed to find any more recent success stories.
Shake was a big one. Apple loved to put Lord of the Rings and King Kong on its homepage, but Jobs always seemed pissed that they couldn't dumb Shake down. Artists at Weta, ILM, Etc and others were not about to tolerate a gimped product.
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.
Another controversial one was Lala.com, if I recall right — they shut it down right away, but it had an avid user base.
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.
It's built in to Siri though. So Apple benefitted from Shazam. I'd say Apple's Weather app has also significantly benefitted (albeit a bit late) from Dark Sky's acquisition
Filemaker might as well have been bought when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It's such an acquisition from another era that it's a fully owned-subsidiary of Apple inc. that is completely separate from the rest of the company. Do you know how many other subsidiaries Apple has?
It (optionally) integrates with the Apple Music Android app now, and offers to add to your library there whenever you scan a song, so I assume it's a good funnel for them to get people into their service ecosystem.
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.
That iGesture pad was a life saver when I was using a PC at work. I eventually switched to Mac and got used to their trackpad gestures, although I still change the settings to enable 3-finger click-and-drag like the iGesture.
The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... most of what you liked about Pixelmator is likely no more over the next year or two. Depending on Apple's reasoning for the acquisition (i.e. how much of it was just for the talent vs the product) you'll may see some small glimpses of Pixelmator's influence a couple years from now in Apple's stuff. Most of the time Apple doesn't keep the acquired product around.
On acquisitions like DarkSky (RIP), sure. This looks a lot more like a Logic-style acquisition.
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"?
And the management team that brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps to this day. Apple doesn't wipe out management during acquisitions, it permanently entrenches them in their structure.
> I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc...
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.
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.
Logic and and Final Cut were bought and developed since. Pixelmator fills the open Photoshop space in an Apple way, and will plausibly go the same way — no vague pessimism required.
The (almost) direct counter example is Aperture. That was the “Pro” photo application and it was killed for seemingly no reason with no notice. It’s fairly reasonable to be pessimistic about this acquisition given that history.
The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app and Apple doesn’t actually want to have a separate image editor (let alone two).
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?
Dark Sky would've added more value if they'd just renamed it Weather and made it the built-in app, and yet...
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.
Eh, I don’t think it’s the same thing. The gulf between “photos user” and “pixelmator” user is quite high, much more so than “weather app” and “weather app but better”.
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.
Also remember that some of those have been crippled in the past. iMovie used to be way more advanced. Older versions of Pages had (pretty basic but still) layout options that were completely removed.
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 would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app.
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.
Apple sells Macs. The Mac platform is enhanced by the existence of Pixelmator as an exclusive app.
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.
> Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt.
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?
There’s no way Apple can build this. Their human interface people all seem to be gone on the desktop. So many things work so bad these days when they migrated to the new ui framework.
At the time Apple bought eMagic, Logic's UI sucked. It actually had dialogs that told you to "reboot the dialog for changes to take effect."
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.
I want to point out that the same management team that brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps. Apple drag and drops teams into their org chart and gives them tons of autonomy.
> The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple...
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.
I don’t understand why companies buy other companies for the talent and not product. Why not just make everyone working there an incredible offer at the same time? It would cost so so so much less than these massive buy outs. Maybe not all of them would take you up on it, but if you buy the company a lot of them may not stick around post-buyout anyway. I feel like this would be a lot more effective also because in a buyout, employees just make the same old salary at the new company. In my method, they make a ton more and are more likely to stay
> Why not just make everyone working there an incredible offer at the same time?
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.
it's ridiculous how america is all about free markets except for the instances where rich people could lose money, then suddenly free markets are bad and evil
Which rich people are you talking about, the buyer or the seller? Presumably the buyer of a startup is richer than the startup founders. If poaching all the employees of a company was legal, then we’d end up with only monopolies by the largest and richest, and it would be legal for big companies to crush smaller competition. The playing field in the U.S. and everywhere globally is definitely biased toward the rich, but you’re inadvertently arguing for even greater concentration of wealth, it doesn’t seem like this argument is well thought out.
Step 1: make everyone an incredible offer
Step 2: get them all hired away from your competitor who is now out of business
Step 3: in a year or two, restructure all these people out (or just fire them if your jurisdiction allows)
Step 4: your competitor is gone, and all it cost was a year or two of salaries.
Seems like a great way to help out budding monopolies.
it seems like you can just prevent this by providing incentives for your employees to not get poached, and also companies that mass-hire-mass-fire would get reputations for doing so, and people wouldn't fall for it. making it illegal instead of requiring businesses to actually pay for retention and loyalty in a free market way is so silly
When a mass employment offer is made to steal or destroy another business, it's usually something ridiculous. For developers it might be a million a year each, for example. It's not an amount intended to be paid perpetually so it can be larger than the defending business can be paying to retain.
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.
The 'people wouldn't fall for it' is in error.
People aren't rational actors and don't have complete information.
That's a bold statement, I know, but it's at least as correct as 'people wouldn't fall for it'. I'm pretty sure it's easy to make a case for 'too many people will fall for it'.
Multiple reasons. That it does happen should be reason to question your assumptions, rather than assume some obvious imagined alternative has been overlooked by everyone, right?
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.
I'll admit, as an attorney, this isn't my specialty, and every jurisdiction varies, but the ye olde common law of tortuous interference requires something more than mere competition, this is America, not the EU.
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.").
Correct, tortious interference has criteria, and making competing employment offers doesn’t necessarily or automatically meet those criteria, but it could if there are other factors involved. Again, it depends on the situation.
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?
Agree with the other person - there's nothing unethical about hiring people in right-to-work laws and systems however you like. employers can fire at any time with no reason, the reverse also has to be true that they can hire at any time with no reason
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
Like the other person, you’re arguing about individual hires, and not considering the implications of whole-company mass poaching.
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
Ya that’s a solid point. Though many startups give their employees equity options… so you have to factor that in too. Also buying a start up for talent seems risky since many people that join startups are looking for a totally different energy than a large corporation, so it seems reasonable that there’d be a big drop off of that talent as soon as it gets acquired… especially if the vision is not aligned
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.
Ok so to be fair.. I own an iPhone for about 3 years now and only discovered it comes shipped with Shazam about 6 months ago and only used it twice since. When I told my wife (also a somewhat long-time iPhone user), she didn’t know it came build-in either.
I’m not a power user, neither is my wife.. I don’t think it is all that well advertised.
Shazam was bought to boost Siri’s ability to recognize music but Siri isn’t really good at much, so it hasn’t been fully absorbed. Now with AI eating the world I assume that functionality will get reproduced by a foundation model and actually integrated into the OS
That's interesting. Is Shazam a default control center button for new phones? I don't remember how mine got there. (There's still probably a discovery issue with those buttons as they're just icons.)
Really? Even though the company is in Lithuania? It seems like they’d probably keep on working on Pixelmator or something closely related since any other teams would be a long way away.
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.
I am a regular runner. The accurate micro-forecasts on Dark Sky were a huge help for me to plan ahead so I wouldn't get caught in the rain. Apple Weather mostly fails at this.
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.
> Apple Weather requires this awkward tap and drag gesture to see actual temperature values through the day.
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.
I miss the visualization, but IMO the biggest feature loss is the history feature. You could select any day in the past, even going back decades, and get historical weather information.
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.
> I miss the visualization, but IMO the biggest feature loss is the history feature.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It happens after multiple refreshes, and it’s just a specific example I chose out of many cases… though it may be possible that the backend server just ignores all that and sends me old data anyways…
Apple Weather is still missing some of the data that Dark Sky exposed, like cloud coverage percentage and other niche info. I also find the UX a little worse, as I like more data at a glance. But you can tell they're using the Dark Sky backend, as it has the same bugs that Dark Sky had, like slowing loading map tiles which sometimes fail altogether. And there was the time they accidentally reenabled the Dark Sky API after an Apple backend deployment. :D
I was (selfishly) happy with the acquisition because DarkSky didn't support where I live. Now I have hyperlocal rain notifications I didn't get before.
Coming from the perspective of a non-DarkSky user, the DarkSky acquisition added tons of value for me. Apple's iOS Weather app is better than it's ever been in terms of accuracy and feature-breadth.
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've heard that Apple Weather is much less reliable nowadays outside of the U.S., but I agree that it's super accurate for me on the East coast of the states.
Late this summer, Apple Weather finally lost me (I'm in Indiana).
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 worthless in Thailand. I was checking it last week with a Thai friend here in Bangkok. The forecast was clear skies while in fact we had an epic monsoon storm.
A fun fact about ITCZ is that you will simply not find a reliably correct weather forecast. In places like Bangkok or (depending on the season) Hong Kong locals normally know to use the weather radar.
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!
I learned that there’s no umbrella weather. Either rain’s too light, or the damn thing snaps/flies away but the street’s basically a river anyway.
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).
If you mention sidewalks, remember cars that splash you with dirty water. You’d think umbrellas are of limited use, until one snaps in the wind and you cut yourself trying to fix it—then you’d hate them!
I think it's more relevant to ask "Is there any way this can end well?". Unless a company is basically down and out an acquisition, especially by a mega-corp, is basically never going to make things better.
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.
And now seemingly working only on Copilot. The release notes of Visual Studio Code used to begin with accessibility, an indication of commitment to an important pillar of their software. But the KPIs have moved, and now Copiloy takes the spotlight
Why worry about something you have no control over? Keep using it, but be exploring alternatives now in case it does. Don't waste energy fretting over this.
I feel like those ideas are contradictory. Exploring alternatives just in case is wasting energy.
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.
It is wasted, because in this situation you’re forced to do it. If you end up not switching, all the time you spent trying something else comes to nothing. If you do switch, you were still forced to spend a bunch of time looking for something.
For me, "nothing" is rarely true. When I've had to learn a tool that operated in a different way, I've often come away realizing that I could think about a common task differently, or that there are capabilities I didn't realize I wanted.
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.
Yes, I agree, “nothing” won’t always be true. But I felt like the idea came across and that having to overly explain and nitpick my own clarification was unnecessary.
While I am also very sad about DarkSky, it doesn't always go that way. Shazam was purchased by Apple many years ago, and many people have no idea. It still a stand alone app, but got control center options and Siri integration (even for those who didn't have the app installed). While the app does push Apple Music a bit, it's largely clean and without other ads, which would probably not be the case if they were still on their own.
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.
In view of how AI is changing graphics tools, my guess would be that Pixelmator's pay-once business model didn't bode well for long term competitive viability.
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.
I can’t think of any Apple software that doesn’t get the job done, isn’t straightforward about its capabilities, and isn’t easy to use. Their whole shtick seems to be just that.
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.
I dunno, I thought "sherlocking" wouldn't be a thing if they acquired instead of duplicating their solution in-house, but it's the same effect, just more equitable to the original creators.
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.
It started off only using the USA's National Weather Service as a source[0] but gradually added international support[1]. But even then, outside of the US/UK, you would have been better off finding an app that you know uses your region's weather stations.
apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while. aperture dying was a bummer, and final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them.
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.
Aperture could have been amazing, but it was slow, buggy and suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to - just as Lightroom appeared.
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.
One of the senior Aperture team members went off to use the underlying OS RAW infrastructure in product called Gentleman Coders Nitro. It's a decent but little known Lightroom alternative with no subscription, albeit without all the recent Lightroom AI-infused features. It does have AI masking though.
I bought their previous software "RAW Power", because it was a one-time perpetual license. Then they rewrote the app (it's worse now BTW), rebranded as Nitro, and stopped updating the previous one to be able to charge again.
The Pixelmator team did the same thing with "Pixelmator Classic".
A fantastic product but the colour science does not look great from a first play, and I don't know if seven days is long enough to figure it out. If I had a job I'd pull the trigger anyway, but too much of a luxury right now. I can't believe I did not know about this application. Shocking marketing! :D
> FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.
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.
Yea, if Apple is going to want their VR products to succeed they're going to have to rely heavily on some vertical integration on video capture/editing software, and FCPX (and now Pixelmator for the spatial photography efforts) seems like the natural place to put those efforts.
It feels a bit strange though that they made FCP for iPhone/iPad a subscription, and completely separate one from the Mac App.
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.
Yeah this. Aperture was a mess. Some of the "full" edit tools from Aperture are actually lurking in Photos which is a fairly competent photo editor on macOS surprisingly.
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.
I was quite surprised (pleasantly) with the editing features available in Photos. I rarely use it on the desktop, and primarily only use it on the device I took the image, but to see how much more in depth the editing was on desktop was one of those that I thought for a second might make me switch to using it for device captured image editing.
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
The no-subscription aspect is a huge differentiator IMO, and depending on situation is even worth trading off features. Losing access to your work because you stopped your Adobe subscription sucks, as does the eventual premium over single-purchase.
Logic is a weird one. It has really truly excellent included instruments (such as Alchemy) and effects, but the app itself feels rather outdated. The mixer, whilst having had some nice features added since Logic 9, is in dire need of an update.
I believe the Logic team are still based in Germany, where the original Emagic team that produced Logic were based, so it's not that they are languishing, but an intentional decision has been made (either by them or Apple) to keep this structure.
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.
All the AI hubris but Logic still does not do fades or zero crossings when cutting audio clips. And don't get me started on the audio zoom. This is basic stuff!
It feels like the audio code was not touched since emagic days.
In defence of the AI hubris, I laid down a funky rhythm guitar track, verse and chorus, and then fiddled around with the AI bassist and AI drummer and blow-me-down-with-a-feather if the results weren't outstanding. Like a perfect demo. I was able to send that to my mate and say, here you go, here's a demo with guide tracks for the bass.
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.
Huh. Doesn't return to the one, ever? You've got sort of a I - III - IV thing going on, and it just goes to IV and stays there forever. Did you think that was the root?
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 think I played straight into Logic with the metronome on, two sections and then pushed that forward to create some blank bars for the intro and then added the drummer on multiple tracks and same for bassist, then fiddled with some of the settings for each section.
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.
This seems like a very weird hill to die on, specifically concidering this is a feature I would want explicitly off and wouldn't care about existing.
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.
You might be diligent to check your cuts in Sample Editor.
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.
I don't use logic. I find it to be no good but regardless I still wouldn't die on that hill.
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...
Unfortunately I am in position where I have to master mixes done in Logic and this backwards crap can easily add up to half an hour onto every track. Sick of it. Dying on that hill!
I mean put it in your requirements and reject the mix if it contains pops and clicks... Whoever did the mixing has the original with cuts so can add fades much much quicker than you can.
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.
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?
Adobe have (had?) a DNG file-format that encompasses the RAW data, JPEGs and the changes, but by the simple fact that adjustments are application-specific anything you do to modify the image won't be portable. It's basically a TIFF file with specific tags for photography.
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.
Yeah, even DNGs don't really work because as you say, the edits are application specific. My entire workflow converted everything to DNG for about 15 years but now I don't bother.
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?
Aperture always (I think, definitely by 1.5) extracted the IPTC metadata, along with other vendor-specific data from photos. I think (hey, it's almost 20 years ago..) it was 2.0 when we supported XMP. It definitely came in at some time, but it wasn't there at the start and I can't recall exactly when.
Going back to 2007, so can't remember super clearly, but IIRC the db was a sqlite like thing and all info about everything was stored in this, and it was vulnerable to corruption, plus all versions and thumbnails were mixed together with original image files - a total mess. The digital photo management landscape wasn't so mature then, and some people trusted Aperture with their original images whereas later versions allowed or encouraged people to keep their "masters" elsewhere.
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.
Aperture 1.0 was very slow. The stories I could tell about its genesis...
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.
Thanks for the lovely insight, super interesting - I don't think I made it to Aperture 2 - but sounds like some unusual decisions made in that editing process. I suspect, based on my own history with disk problems, that the filesystem issues that would regularly pop up and not dealt with by your average technically-over-trusting student were the root cause, but exacerbated by the choices of image management and application speed.
Apple gained so much professional mindshare in the early 2000s with FCP, Shake, Logic, Aperture, Motion, XSan, XServe, etc. I worked in a graphics/media studio at the time, and the excitement was palpable. And creating things with those apps was just fun.
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.
It seems there was a huge loss of software in the 32bit->64bit switch. Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift (or whatever the specific languages were). FCPX is such a different version than FCP. Just like QTPlayerX is so different than QT Player 7 Pro was such a regression of capabilities. I doubt there was a "this is the best QT Player we've ever released" on that "upgrade".
people who work in jobs tend to talk about their tools. i worked in tv for a while a couple decades back, i went to school for film, and thus i have many friends who do creative video editing and professional video editing and still follow the industry closely. i'm not talking about typical social media buzz, i'm talking about "companies moving on to the product" or even "companies continuing to use the product," or professionals choosing to invest in the tool for their work.
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.
My mistake then, I thought you meant a more general social media kind of buzz.
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.
one hundred percent - and i felt like when they initially launched garageband they were doing a great play to get people (particularly folks who dabble and school kids) invested in the logic-style workflow to build up their familiarity so that folks entering the industry would demand it in their workplaces... and then it all just fell off. they actually seemed to want to have that kind of flow in place for basically every kind of professional tool! imovie->FCP and garageband->logic being the prime examples (or maybe only, I guess) that I can think of.
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.)
To the contrary, you want there to be buzz around their new features. As a professional, you need to keep up, and you want new features to reduce your busywork in the app.
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 suppose we need to be more specific about what we mean by buzz.
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 dunno, I'd be more inclined to subscribe to a version of Photoshop CS1/CS2 that runs on modern operating systems where all development effort goes into fixing bugs and improving performance instead of something like current Photoshop CC, where the focus is on gee-whiz gimmicky features. Plugins can fill in for the gee-whiz stuff without turning the core app into a cosmically bloated mess.
Still sad that the Apple-award-winning vector drawing program Lineform all-but vanished. (and don't get me started on Freehand being bought by Adobe which is why I need to find a replacement vector drawing tool)
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.
That is why I settled on it. The other one I was working with was FabBSD. I still have the source to that it is an OpenBSD focused on CAM. I think the developer lost interest when OpenBSD switched the security model for GPIO.
The abandoning of FCPX after surviving the reputation blow it took during the transition from 7->X is baffling to me. In the mid 2010s it was actually a fantastic NLE, I used it for professional work for a solid decade. When it comes to speed editing there’s just nothing like it. But starting around 2019 or 2020 they just began to let it languish. To say they don’t have feature parity with resolve and premiere is beyond an understatement, whereas they were trailblazing some great stuff previously. Their multi-cam and audio sync’ing was next to none at one time.
I was around there ~2019 the original FCPX design team was purged when the art director from a print magazine took over for the pro apps. He brought in people worked on stuff like the LinkedIn website, ESPN baseball apps and Disney games. Engineers and QA were annoyed having to explain concepts like timecode
It's weird seeing all this discussion of this being a new entry into Apple's pro apps, I'm curious what you folks think Apple has to gain from expanding their pro line up today?
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.)
> it feels like something they'd be well-positioned to seriously take on if they invested heavily in it.
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.
Logic falls into a weird space between pro (studio) software and home studio software. Professional studios mostly use Pro Tools and Cubase (Europe). Home users mostly migrated to Live. It's obviously an oversimplification but it does reflect the problem Logic is facing.
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.
There's some other places that migrated to Reaper because of its own specialties. Reaper runs great and is absurdly, unreasonably customizable.
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.
Interesting, that's a very cool idea! I tried Reaper when it was released but didn't find a good reason to move away from Pro Tools. That was a very long time ago though.
What's the best community for sharing ReaScripts? Also, is your script available anywhere?
Apple is clearly investing in it, but for whatever reason it's simply not got the foothold it once had and they don't seem super interested in pushing it and people aren't using it. I feel like it's substantially less prominent in the industry than it was a decade or two ago, I see it in far fewer studios (or, even further I'll say I literally have not seen anyone using it in person in the past ten years, which is a marked change.) For a very long time, I feel like cubase/logic/pro tools were The DAWs That People Used. Logic doesn't seem to be appealing to new producers as much and it doesn't seem like Apple is as invested in pushing or promoting it as it used to be. I might be wrong, though!
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.
OS X used to have iPhoto, which was a really decent app in the days of early digital photography. Until Apple decided to replace it with a more "streamlined" Photos app, by removing a lot of features.
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?
fwiw, you're forgetting Mainstage, which is the defacto industry standard (alongside Ableton, to an extent) for live performance. There's a cottage industry of Mainstage session sales and sound design that is funded by basically every theater production in the United States from high school to Broadway which is wild if you think about it.
Garageband is also way more popular than people realize. Logic, (which is Garageband+ since version 10, essentially) has a few features that anyone in that ecosystem really wants. Logic + Mainstage is still unbeaten for the value for recording/production/performance, while Ableton continues to rot and Bitwig gets slightly better (but is still no Logic, and costs 3x more for fewer features)
Final Cut had its lunch eaten by DaVinci and Premiere. And anyone with money was/is using Avid still, just like with Pro Tools.
What I think would probably be a more likely thing to happen is for Apple to create a subscription called "Apple Creative" or sth. as soon as they have a similar assortment of programs to rival Adobe as having one subscription for all of their applications is currently their biggest advantage.
apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while
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.
Well done team Lithuania! Remember hearing Pixelmator founders giving a speech ~12 years ago. They were very vocal and repeated this many times: "Our marketing strategy is to just focus on the product". Not sure I agree with that statement, but they sure seem to followed it thoroughly. Congrats on the acquisition!
> "Our marketing strategy is to just focus on the product".
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.
Nice change of pace from the current zeitgeist of, "you should really be Extremely Online to have a chance!" that is oft-repeated by...Extremely Online people.
I use it for ages, and did not get to know it through promotion or advertisement or campaign but reputation. And I stayed, updated not because some chatter buzz or famousness or other face matter but because it was good for me. Their strategy worked then and there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm half unsurprised as Pixelmator was one of the apps that was extremely-tightly-integrated with Apple's APIs and ecosystem and was an excellent app as a result, and half worried that Apple will make unpopular changes to it as it's a less user-friendly app by necessity. (see also recently: Apple's Dark Sky acquisition and the worse integration of it into the Weather app)
The other half of this equation is Sketch. Pixelmator is great for photos, Sketch is great for vectors and UI design. Both committed to being first-class macOS applications. But Sketch has steadily been losing ground to Figma. I wonder if an acquisition is on the cards there as well?
Figma to me feels geared toward collaborative prototyping specifically. It’s kinda clunky and awkward for creation of graphical assets, which is where I find Sketch a lot nicer.
> Pixelmator was one of the apps that was extremely-tightly-integrated with Apple's APIs and ecosystem
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.
I don’t think this will be good for users, but I do think this is the right call at the right time for the company. They get (presumably) top dollar for their outfit prior to the next big market crash, and just as investor funding is drying up outside the AI realms. Hopefully everyone involved gets enough dosh to live comfortably, and can focus on their next big passion or project once the NDAs and Non-Competes run their course.
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.
For what it's worth: a friend of mine has extracted the Fuji LUTs from the "official raw converter" and has been using them in darktable happily ever after ;)
Pixelmator is my favorite photo editing tool. It’s like Photoshop without the baggage/subscription and is perfect for the types of edits I need to do. I’m cautiously optimistic about this acquisition, I almost hope Apple just makes it free as part of the iLife suite (or whatever it’s called now).
I bought and used Pixelmator a long time ago, but stopped right after Affinity Photo (and Designer) came out. I didn't follow its development very closely since then. Has anyone used both Pixelmator and Affinity Photo recently? I'd appreciate some comparison here.
I’ve used both extensively since release. Anything but Adobe.
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).
I'm not a fan of Adobe at all but I used to do a lot of work in Photoshop. The top features for nearly 30 years have not been the destructive editing portion of the app but the composition tools.
By composition tools I mean the layer, channel, and layer effects tools. Layer effects/adjustments and masks make for easy compositing and live readjustment. It's the live nature of these features which is helpful because you're having to constantly refine the look of things based on a client's feedback. Photoshop manages to handle all sorts of layering while still providing color correct output.
It's not glamorous but it's important and most supposed Photoshop competitors over the decades fail at it. Some tools do many of the same things but I don't know of apps that can do everything Photoshop does it that space.
It's fine to snipe at Photoshop users that only have very basic needs for which Photoshop is overkill. I don't do anything graphic design anymore so Pixelmator and Affinity Photo have my needs covered. I purchased both and they've been well worth the money. But if you want to actually go after professional Photoshop users, not just incidental users, you really need 100% of Photoshop's functionality. Otherwise you'll miss a must-have feature that some designer requires for their workflow.
As much as I've enjoyed Pixelmator it's not even 50% of Photoshop's capabilities. It's not even on par with the decades old Photoshop 6.
I agree. The feature that keeps me using Illustrator vs all the other vector graphics apps is group isolation. Nobody has implemented this properly and it's a deal breaker since my vector workflow relies on groups instead of using layers.
OTOH it could very well be that Apple intends to invest into Pixelmator and make it a pro app.
Every time they try to bump me up to a higher plan I tell them that I don't need it any more and it's too expensive and they give me stupid deals. I think currently I'm paying $25 a month but they refunded me the first month where I accidentally lapsed back onto the "real" pricing, and gave me the next four months for free. So basically $175 for the year. I'll probably cancel it next time it comes up though, I basically only use it for complicated PDF stuff, and I'm sure I can find something else to do that.
You just tell them that you don't find it valuable and if you've been a customer for long enough they will bend over backwards to keep you. I used to buy several copies of CS3 and CS4 back when they came on DVD and I'm still using the same account, and moved to subscriptions with three seats as soon as they came in. So my LTV is probably fairly compared to a normal "consumer" account where they've only ever subscribed. Obviously compared to an enterprise account it's nothing, but if you're buying enterprise licensing I imagine you're getting it for less than $30 per seat per month.
yet building an adobe alternative could be daunting. Even for Apple. Adobe products have been polished for decades. IMHO Taking on Adobe is as hard as a another company taking on Apple by building apple like products.
Calling Adobe apps polished is a hot take. Adobe products are houses that have been added onto until the learning curve on their apps is similar to that of taking up playing a pipe organ.
Weird, because the overlap between After Effects and Resolve is insignificantly small. Anyone using AE for post-processing only has been in the wrong app for years already.
Some people may not be familiar with the fact that BlackMagic Design incorporated its motion graphics and VFX package, Fusion, into Resolve a few years ago. It's an incredibly powerful compositing package, though its node-based architecture may present a nontrivial learning curve for people accustomed to the pre-comping workflow of AE.
Do you have a source for folks doing motion graphics with Resolve? Always curious to hear more data points on this. The impression I have from reading online is I'd be shocked if they had over 1% of the market, but it's purely anecdotal.
Sorry no data points, just what I've seen first hand.
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.
If you don't mind sharing I'd love to hear which industry you're in. What I typically hear is advertising is Premiere, Hollywood is Avid, and Resolve is taking over prosumer/smaller shops (although still AE for any remotely sophisticated motion graphics/2D work). And Nuke for VFX compositing. I've actually never heard of Fussion itself being being popular for anything actually, 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.
Personally I'm mostly in web dev but I work with design shops, agencies, etc. I also do audio production, photography, and some video. But you're right that I'm in contact with small creative shops (less than 50 people).
> 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).
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.
I guess it depends where you work. In CAD and 3D animation work, Windows machines outnumber the Macs I see 10:1. In smaller shops this ratio probably flips around but Adobe (and others) have a large and captive contingent of Windows users to profit off.
"graphics people" aren't the core people using Adobe's products though. As evidenced by the terrible designs people keep cranking out using photoshop. And by the huge market for terrible-design-by-numbers Canva.com
We all live in our own bubbles. I never saw a tech person using MacOS, it's always Windows or Linux - I assume that's not your experience either (and I only know a few people using MacOS privately). That probably mostly depends on the country one resides in.
Well, the view laid out here also corresponds to actual statistical reality: About 29% of developers reported using Macs (of any kind) as of a few years ago, it's not even close to "most", as some HN visitors would have you believe. The bubble is very real.
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.
I've been forced to use Windows in the creative graphics world. Back long ago in the dark ages, I did layout/graphics for a 'zine that was all done on Windows NT with Adobe software delivered to press on a Syquest disk.
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??
Really? I worked in Hollywood for many years and all the color grading and photo editing was done on PCs with Sony professional color grading monitors, which weren't supported right on Macs.
Pixelmator could never compete with Adobe. Their expertise is on Mac and until now they didn't have the resources to make a big product like Photoshop or Illustrator (at some point they shared the idea of making a vector graphics product but it was abandoned).
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.
This is in no way a criticism of the news, but if Pixelmator isn't for you, consider trying Acorn, developed by the reputable indie developer Gus Mueller:
+1 for Acorn, and also check out Retrobatch by the same developer - it's a super powerful image processing environment - the way I'd describe it is like having a visual command line dedicated to image processing (but better because it's visual and you don't have to read man pages).
I bought Pixelmator nearly a decade ago for my Mac, when I needed a decent image/photo editor. I hope they make Pixelmator free, as mac definitely needs a good default image editor that is more advanced than Preview.
wow, something I know a lot about. I used to work on the Photos Edit team at Apple.
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!
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.
The issue with Windows support for tools like Pixelmator is that a great many of its features are wrappers around OS level image manipulation libraries that come with macOS/iOS - Windows doesn't have anything like the rich image manipulation libraries built in that macOS has, so to get feature parity would very likely involve building from scratch a ton of the stuff they didn't have to do on macOS. The Pixelmator developers have said this before in their own support forums too when question of Windows/Linux support is asked.
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.
I always assumed Apple's strategy in building Core Image was to encourage developers to create image editing apps so they didn't have to. Plant the seeds and watch the flowers bloom. Perhaps it hasn't happened in quite the way they hoped.
They sold to Canva, which is strictly subscription based. As far as I know there haven’t been negative changes yet, but we’re still in the period before we’d see them.
Did you see the statement from Canva and Serif after those kinds of rumors started circling? They made a strong statement that they aren't making Affinity apps subscription or dissolving the teams on those apps. It's not the usual silence on post-acquisition plans.
It does, and this makes me nervous that they’ll screw it up. I’m a user of Apple Logic Pro and they’ve done a decent job of keeping it going for what, fifteen plus years? But I can’t offhand think of any other popular acquisition that they’ve improved upon and the kept improving off the top of my head (I’m sure there’s more that I’m not thinking of, maybe CUPS) without just sorta forgetting. At least there’s still Acorn.
The "Shortcuts" app was an acquisition and is fairly powerful as a graphical system automation app. I created a shortcut that looks up the overnight weather at my home, and determines if it needs to turn on the AC to run for ~30 minutes before I go to bed so the room is comfortably cool.
Pure speculation: This is about visionOS. Photo editing is the least friction "pro" task to bring to a spatial computing platform.
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.
I think Pixelmator probably already runs on visionOS (I don't have one personally) but I doubt they spend enough engineering resources to make it amazing because the ROI isn't worth it for a third party company. But of course Apple can make Pixelmator amazing on visionOS without even noticing the cost.
There have been a couple of bits in the news about Vision Pro, the specific hardware product. Nobody knows their plans for the future of the platform as a whole though. They just hosted a developer event for visionOS a few weeks ago https://www.toddheberlein.com/blog/2024/10/3/a-cozy-wwdc
They didn’t. The thing you found about reducing production is likely what GP is thinking of. The headlines had several people thinking the same as them on first read.
Astonishingly to me at the time, the app never had a History function (as in Photoshop, list of history you could click through). I had been waiting 3+ years for it to materialize, in order to purchase it. Have since moved on to vector editors and don't see a need to go back.
*Actually now that I think about it, I don't seem to miss the lack of History in vector editors (and just use undo).
iMovie lets you select the resolution. File > Share > File, and the dialog that pops up has a picker for resolution right underneath the picker for format.
It defaults to the maximum resolution of the first clip that you import. So if you import a 720p movie first and want to export to 4k later on, you can't. You can export smaller but not larger. To export at 4K, you have to get rid of everything, import a 4k clip, and put everything back. And even then, resolutions are preset, you can't do a custom resolution.
I think “iMovie can’t upscale” is a lot more accurate then. “iMovie doesn't allow you to select the resolution” is very misleading, because it does allow you to do that.
No, it's not just about upscaling, please re-read what I wrote. iMovie can upscale. You just have to trick it into doing so, because you can't set the resolution. Also, you are limited to the 720, 1080, 4k etc. If you want to export a square movie you can't. Best option is to export from iMovie and crop it in iPhoto.
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.
Okay so how do I set the resolution of an output video to 100 x 100 in iMovie?
(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.
I am fearing that Photomator+Pixelmator get absorbed into the Photos app, but I'm clinging onto the small slimmer of hope that, instead, they'll become entries into the Apple "Pro-Apps" family (next to FCPX, Logic, etc).
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?
My initial assumption is that this is more about Photomator than Pixelmator (ie. their Lightroom alternative rather than their Photoshop alternative).
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)
Hopefully Apple doesn't ruin this, but I assume that it will be infested with Apple AI features sooner than later. Oh well, at least Pixelmator Pro is not a subscription service, so it will last me for a while even if that becomes the case.
>it’s crazy what a small group of dedicated people have been able to achieve over the years from all the way in Vilnius, Lithuania
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.
Yeah, it’s a silly segway. The team could have moved somewhere “safe” at any time before the acquisition lol. I’m from the Baltics as well, we are not moving anywhere from our land, photo editing features can wait.
Just curious but what makes a non-Photoshop photo-editor tool "good"? Aside from AI fill, it seems like the fundamentals of this space haven't changed much since CS6 for 90% of design usecases.
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
I'm still on Pixelmator classic 3.9 (it's what I have a license for) and it's great. Does everything I need easily as a casual user, and it hasn't changed in years! I've never even thought about upgrading.
Really glad for them. Pixelmator Pro is my go-to image editing software. Reminds me of Fireworks (which I really liked, but then Adobe happened) with slightly worse vector functionalities.
Curious if anybody has a good “combined” editor to suggest.
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?
This is both simultaneously surprising (given how long they’ve been in the perfect space to acquire) and unsurprising (given that they’re a perfect fit)
I love Pixelmator Pro, especially because of no subscription fee. If you own Pro for more than 4 months you're spending less money than you would on Photoshop!
It's the sweet spot for me. I don't edit images for a living, but I push pixels around enough for hobbies (e.g. making video game maps) that I want something user friendly and pleasant. Pixelmator Pro has way more features than I'll ever need or use, and all the ones I do need are ergonomic to me, a person who doesn't have decades of Photoshop muscle memory.
With apple giving away garageband for so long, I was always surprised that they didn't have a decent graphics editor option, so this makes a lot of sense to me.
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 am dying to ditch Adobe and Lightroom (both Classic or CC) but none of the alternatives (Photomator included) seem to have the same quality of library management features as Lightroom (metadata editing, rating, keywords, face recognition etc.). Have any enthusiast photographers actually found a decent replacement?
Combining Pixelmator and Procreate via airdrop is such a nice workflow. I'm happy for the team and I'm holding out hope this will be good for Mac users in the long run. A Blackmagic acquisition would also be interesting. It's too bad there isn't a vector drawing app that's at the same level of Mac integration as Pixelmator. I've used Inkscape and it was amazing but unfortunately very slow.
I am extremely fond of Pixelmator -- I bought the original maybe twelve years ago, and Pixelmator Pro as soon as it came out.
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.
Love that app, and when they first came out their UI/UX was better than Apple. I remember seeing their dark panels styling and thinking it was sleek and ahead of its time, Apple adopted that same look and feel not long after with their pro apps.
Adobe is going online as in Photoshop will be browser based in the future as they already have a beta version. The days you have an Adobe desktop app that sends data to the cloud will be over in probably 10yrs. Sure they will probably make an "local desktop app" the same way Figma does, but it won't be a true desktop app anymore.
This seems like it would be a good match, except that Apple has a history of "odd" decisions when it comes to in-house software, from HyperCard to Claris Works to Final Cut Pro to Aperture. If I relied on Pixelmator, I would be at least a little bit worried.
Can someone give some insight why acquisitions like this happen? Is it to take over the user base or is it actually about the product itself?
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.
Apple can bring in new users beyond Pixelmator's wildest dreams. This is definitely a product/talent acquisition. And Pixelmator has almost 2 decades worth of development already baked in, not sure how anyone can do it cheaper.
Emagic's Logic is the pro software example. But they've killed others, like Chalice and RAYZ (purchased from Silicon Grail) were killed before Apple released Motion, and Nothing Real was purchased for Shake which was killed 6 years later.
The only acquisition? Emagic, the original maker of Logic was acquired some 20 years ago and now Logic is one of if not the flagship software product sold by Apple
My ability to think of examples obviously isn't that great.
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.
I was worried Workflow was totally screwed as a product after Apple bought it, but they've done a really great job at turning it into Shortcuts and integrating it across all their platforms.
Being able to put Shortcuts into Control Center in iOS 18 is a handy option, if anyone missed that you can do that now.
Leaving aside pricing specifics, the main issue with subscriptions is for products that you just fire up once in a great while. So long as the pricing is reasonable, I have no particular issue with subscriptions for products I use on a routine basis--especially if they're products that more or less require ongoing updates to remain useful.
For me personally, Pixelmator is absolutely a product I just fire up once in a great while. I bought it anyway because when I need it, I need it. But there's no way I would let a program like that deflate my bank account like a pricked balloon.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me. I do subscribe to Photoshop mostly because Lightroom makes sense as a subscription. Otherwise I'd probably make do with GIMP or maybe something like Pixelmator. (I used Photoshop Elements for a long time.)
It doesn't appear that I am. All I meant to add is that if Apple turns Pixelmator into a "cursed subscription zombie" (and I very much doubt this will happen) then I will not be getting that subscription. I expect most people wouldn't either.
Interesting! Do you think a credits-based pricing would be more fair? Only pay for it when you use it? Maybe pay per click? Maybe like how cloud providers charge based on how long you have it open?
Why would they kill it? Is Apple in the graphic design business today?
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.
That would be a nice outcome. I’ve been missing a replacement for Aperture for years. I’m not a professional photographer, but I’ve got more than 30 years of photos inside of Apple Photos. Some old school scans or Photo CDs, some RAW from underwater (Photos does a poor job here), and a ton of iPhone photos.
Bringing a more premium experience to Photos would be a great complement to how you can already shell out to Pixelmator while editing photos.
The big thing Aperture nailed though was photo-management workflows - it was never that great as an image editor. I don't see anything in Pixelmator that moves the needle in an Aperture/Lightroom-type direction by integrating photo management, which was the innovation Aperture and Lightroom brought back at their roughly similar original launch dates. Pixelmator is much more a photoshop alternative IMO.
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 always loved pixelmator and they deserve it. 100% of it! Never greedy, ui and ux top notch and I never missed Photoshop once.
I’m of course a little scared of its future but I hope Apple will just integrate it inside the new OS updates.
Thank you Pixelmator team!!
As a long time Pixelmator user, this really worries me. I loved DarkSky and then Apple acquired and killed it without a good replacement (I switched to Wunderground because Apple Weather is inaccurate, especially for precipitation predictions).
I wonder if this is also their play to offer some options for generative AI, without necessarily going against their current statements related to Photos where they don’t want to fundamentally change what a photograph is.
Bummer. I switched to Affinity (Photo, Designer) this year and am very happy. You can buy a lifetime license across all platforms (iPad, Mac, Windows) for a fixed price. It is great to have high quality software that is not a subscription.
I am not a fan of subscriptions but old versions of Photoshop were also lifetime licenses and a 10y old professional software still works exactly the same now as 10 years ago. Yet I don't see much professional gfx artists and workers claiming they are still using the old licensed software instead of whining about the sub. Is this trolling or are people just slave of the lure of the newest and latest?
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.
you can usually get away with it by chrooting an old release of a distro that has contemporary libs. And this is rarely needed as you usually have the sourcees available under a free license which allows you to recompike and/or port it.
We are talking photoshop anyway so it isn't relevant in that case.
This would be a great acquisition for Apple if they were to use the patents (if any) owned by Pixelmator and the team behind it to work on Apple's Photos app for the next year, now that Apple Intelligence is out in Beta.
Even if there’s a risk of a “Dark sky” outcome, I’m still happy, because I figured that Pixelmator was at long term risk of getting squeezed in the photo-editing market. It’s just tough for indie devs playing with the big boys.
Great news. Hopefully this will drive enough improvements to finally get me off adobe. Photomator is nearly good enough to replace Lightroom and Pixelmator is much nicer than photoshop for casual users.
As a Pixelmator lover, I pray that Apple does not
- kill it as they killed Aperture
- slow down the development to a glacial pace ‘enjoyed’ by their other prosumer software
The best company that could have acquired them. A rebirth of Apple professional tools is desperately needed. Hopefully this is the start of more attention in that direction.
Why is this big news? What exactly is Pixelmator? What I've been able to gather is that it's basically Photoshop, but I didn't get if it's just "yet another Photoshop" or if it has some very unique niche where it's popular or something.
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.
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.
I don't think that's universally true though. An example would be Logic, which Apple kept improving after buying it and it's still a great piece of software.
Apple got scared: if Canva moves Affinity Suite to the web then that makes Apple computers less valuable unless you pay up for Adobe Creative Suite.
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.
Hm? The Affinity Suite already works on Windows, which is realistically Apple's competitor in this space. The only platform moving to the web would enable is Linux and the BSDs, and while that would be great, I don't understand how you think it'd scare Apple?
Killed but what did they do with the tech? Did it find its way into something else? The Apple Weather app has seen lots of positive development that I've assumed was integration of Dark Sky into their app rather than keeping it a separate app.
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.
Putting concerns about future states aside, congrats to the Pixelmator team. I've been using the app for years and it's a really great piece of software, well designed and well built. It's always been incredible value for the price, especially given that it basically replaces Photoshop for a wide swath of the market without compromising on UX (which is a problem for other competitors) at a price point that's like 1-2 months of an Adobe subscription (I don't even know exactly what that costs any more because Pixelmator + parts of the Affinity suite got me out of their clutches).
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.
I suspect this move is due to behind the scenes Adobe / Apple relations souring over the years.
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.
Creative software and macbooks are complement goods. i.e., demand for macbooks goes up when creative software gets cheaper, and vice versa.
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.
> demand for macbooks goes up when creative software gets cheaper
Is this something you just made up, or does this really happen? Colour me sceptical.
Complementary good is a widely accepted economic concept.
Of course, theories and the reality don't always match up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_good
It’s a reframing of vertical integration, which does lead to lower prices or higher value assuming reasonable competition. You can also think of it as disintermediation (“cutting out the middleman”).
It would probably be easier to test the other way round: demand for creative software goes up when macs get cheaper.
I mean theoretically that makes sense? If you get more value for something it increases the chance of buying it? But I also have no idea if this statement is true.
Apple and Adobe have always had a sour relationship. Adobe's crappy font licensing led to truetype and they're crappy implementation of Flash led to Jobs dropping flash in the iPhone just to mention a few things from their history.
Not to mention the fact that there were tons of rumors around Apple developers practically handholding adobe to get them across the finish line for the Apple Silicon port.
Adobe is extremely incompetent wrt actually developing usable, clean and efficient software so I can definitely see this as being plausible
OTOH they’ve used Display PostScript and PDF as their display systems for NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X.
Only MacOS Server 1.o used display postscript, every version since has use Quartz or Quartz Extreme ( also know as Display PDF).
Apple was an early investor in Adobe.
… didn’t Apple switch away from Nvidia, push for OpenCL and keep Adobe in the rain when their new release was all super optimized for Nvidia? And I think heavily push for their proprietary video and image editing software? But Adobe rewrote its codebase and had the better product after all. And that was 15+ years ago?
One article from back in 2010: https://nofilmschool.com/2010/07/apple-snubs-adobe-again-wit...
I don't think so. Mac sales have only grown and the whole "you need a Mac for creative work" hasn't been a thing since the 00's.
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.
There are lots of amateur photographers out there that use Apple hardware yet so far Apple only monetizes storage. I wouldn't be surprised to see a subscription offering that includes pro tier features for Photos.app good enough to replace Lightroom for enthusiasts but not for actual professionals.
Exactly. I want a LR feature like editor that integrates fully with Apple Photos.
That already existed, it was exactly the Photomator that got acquired. Let’s hope it stays alive
99% chance it will not stay alive for more than 1-2 years. Shazam is the only Apple acquisition I know of that still exists independently, and that's only because it promotes Apple Music on Android.
Most likely will be integrated into Photos or possibly even a new advanced photo editing app for macOS/iOS only.
Not to mention Apple's challenge with 30% AppStore tax for subscription revenue.
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.
macOS has no such restrictions as it does not require the App Store.
But macOS requires app notarisation. They again made it harder to run un-notarised apps this year. If you look at the iOS side, it's clear that Apple has no qualms adding content restrictions for app notarisation, and it is more than just a malware check. It could be just a question of time until Apple decides to stop notarising Mac apps that do not use App Store payments.
Notarization isn’t the same, it just requires you have a developer certificate. There’s no restrictions on notarized apps that I’m aware of. It allows Apple to pull the cert if the app is found to be malware.
> There’s no restrictions on notarized apps that I’m aware of.
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.
Meh, Apple might be a little ahead of others, but all mainstream OSes and stores are basically headed this direction already. It’s just part modern security, part quality control, and part family & work friendliness. Most people on both sides actually want a walled garden. There will probably always be ways to run unsigned code and to get content that’s not approved by an app store, but maybe it’s fine if it’s ‘harder’ and not the default.
Yeah Windows does the same thing. It's something indie game devs run into. If you release on Steam, Steam launches your game. Otherwise you have to pay a certificate authority to sign your game or Windows Smart Screen will do the same "this code is sketchy. Are you really really really sure you want to run it?" thing MacOS does for non-notarized apps.
Didn't know what Pixelmator was, looked them up and they only distribute through the App Store.
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.
You do not need to download Xcode via MAS, you can download the disk image directly from their developer website. Going through the MAS has been historically very painful for that big app and the day it is the only option is the day I probably stop using it unless they make some changes.
Sideload?
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.
What unsigned apps do you use? The bar is pretty low to sign.
On the flip side, Vision Pro has no apps and it may not be the biggest reason for its failure, but it’s a contributor that I don’t see changing.
Apple’s main source of innovation is applying mafia tactics to software distribution.
> 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.
I don’t think you’re reading the GPs point very charitably. They’re clearly talking about recent innovations that generate revenue.
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.
Yes, but Apple has always been ahead on technology compared to everyone else, so that doesn’t count anymore. Or something.
As a software developer who made good money reaching hundreds of thousands of people through the app store where the old “put up a website and buy advertising” model might have netted me single-digit thousands of sales, I am always surprised at the white knights telling me I got no value from paying 30% of revenue.
If the app store is “mafia tactics”, I can’t even imagine how demonic things like wholesalers mist be.
The issue with the App Store model is that it's just another platform to market yourself on. In your case, you benefitted from a first-mover (or early-mover) advantage and did well. Over time the App Store becomes more and more saturated with apps and so the value to developers goes down. This is no different from the web! It's merely offset by a few decades.
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)!
> I am always surprised at the white knights telling me I got no value from paying 30% of revenue.
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.
Big corporations get less benefits than small ones.
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
Are there any signs of this souring?
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.
My recollection is that Adobe was slow to migrate from 32-bit to 64-bit x86 because they were still dependent on many of the Carbon APIs (Mac OS 9 compatibility) and those APIs weren't carried over to 64-bit. They dragged their heels about transitioning to Cocoa (NeXT derived) APIs for their UI, and it showed.
It still kills me that Altsys/Aldus/Macromedia let their NeXT codebase for Altsys Virtuoso whither (v2 was essentially Freehand 4 w/ a couple of unfixed bugs) so that when Rhapsody was announced they weren't ready for it.
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.
In general, the way a walled garden wins is by providing everything its villagers need inside.
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.
Assuming you're right, the vertical platform vendors should consider having a public Sherlocking policy. If you're anywhere near Apple's stuff, the Pixelmator outcome is a large fraction of your upside.
Much larger than it should be for the ecosystem's sake. Excessive cannibalism isn't probably in Apple's interest even.
If that’s the case, why not just buy Affinity
Maybe Canva doesn't want to sell.
how is canva related to affinity?
Canva owns Affinity as of March https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/
You know, Apple buying might have more to do with Canva buying Affinity than anything Adobe related.
Bet Apple eyes at the rent that Adobe extracts out of all those subscriptions and wants the same thing for itself. Apple has been in the market of renting out content for decades (starting with iTunes) and this move means people will have less options, not more.
Bingo. Uncommon for a company Apple's size, but they are trying to Innovators Dilemma Adobe. Either by releasing a pro version of Photos.app or adding pro features to Photos they will continue to move up the value chain into Adobes market of LR/PS. Adobe charges $20/month for the LR/PS bundle. If Apple can add some of the prosumer functionality and say increase Apple One by $5, they shift some of the subscription revenue over to them.
I can’t even remember how long have I been a Pixelmator and then Pixelmator pro user. I tried it once and I knew I would never go back to Photoshop again. An incredible bang for the price as well! Congrats to the Pixelmator team, and hoping for a bright future for their product. Fingers crossed though!
I also hope Pixelmator/Pro doesn't die and continues as a product like GarageBand/Logic Pro.
Yep. Me as well. I have the whole Affinity suite as well — including Affinity Photo — but Pixelmator Pro is my go-to.
It’s up there along with Procreate, another amazing product by an independent studio
Procreate really is a killer app for the iPad.
I used to use Pixelmator when I was on a mac. Its great for what it does, but its much much more limited than photoshop. Frankly most people don't need Photoshop. The UI is intuitive enough. I'm on linux now but missed that "preview" app for format/size conversions.
(It has a fun mosaic tool that lets you take a bit of an image and tile it real time which is really fun).
>Adobe must not be stoked about this news
Probably any mac developer should be a little worried. Apple has a mixed history at best with these applications. They had a lightroom competitor (Apeture?) they just dropped out of the blue. (some photographers are still griping) The "final cut pro" upgrade made people start using adobe again. But apple seem to keep the music making stuff going.
Frankly adobe Shold actually port their stuff to linux. The "free" competition is getting good (Krita, Blender, Gimp...). I have a couple pieces I used Gimp to layer together going into a gallery next week. Frankly its different, but pretty good once you get used to the UI.
I don't know how long ago that was, but I've been a Pixelmator user for at least a few years, and it's leaps and bounds ahead of where it was when I started with it. Coupled with Photomater -- its cousin app -- they're certainly starting to give Photoshop a real run for its money in many ways. Of course, not all ways, at least not yet, but I have personally used it for everything from photo touchups to marketing collateral to art elements later incorporated in a range of things including print layouts and videos. Once in a while I bump my head on a missing or incomplete feature that I was surprised to find not yet implemented, but its getting rarer by the month.
Pixelmator + parts of the Affinity suite got me out of their clutches
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?
I gave up on Affinity Photo after discovering that it degrades images as you edit them. Specifically, it blurs entire layers when you merge them. And it does so over and over, making the base layer worse each time. Therefore you can't trust it with your images. Affinity has refused to fix this, making excuses instead. Example here: https://youtu.be/QA8eVWOLL5I
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.
Can you share references for their refusal to fix and their excuses?
Here are a few threads from the forums; there are probably more. The first seems the most extensive. To be fair, I'm not sure if there are employee responses in there or just eager apologists ignoring evidence and blaming other users for the defective behavior:
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...
The first thread is large, for sure, but is it relevant? Why do all of these have to do with pixel art, which is something you probably should do in a pixel art editor (Aseprite[0] is great, cheap and deserves your support)?
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.
0 - https://dacap.itch.io/aseprite
"Pixel art?" They all have to do with photo (bitmap, rather than vector) editing.
I sincerely have no idea what you're talking about.
Dark Sky was fucking awesome
Is there any way this can go bad?
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.
On the other hand, Testflight has a pretty good acquisition story. It got "merged into main" and is now a first class citizen of the iOS development ecosystem. Workflow being acquired and turning into Shortcuts is a pretty successful outcome IMHO. Beats still continues to make slightly cheaper headphones. FoundationDB is still there.
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.
BuddyBuild was acquired by Apple and used for their server CI platform, almost immediately cutting off Android support. That was a shame because it was a great platform for Android builds.
https://www.biv.com/news/technology/bye-bye-android-apple-ac...
I wish every acquisition improved the end product as much as Workflow's did. All Apple's OSes got better for embracing it. I can write and have written AppleScript things, but Shortcuts is a vastly more convenient UX for the things it's good at.
I think the crucial different is Workflow was targeted at what Apple should have been doing from the start. I see it the same way Karabiner, BarTender or QuickSilver (DropBox?) improve the OS experience in ways the platform owner would ideally could have figured out on their own.
Those fundamentally tend to butt against the OS limitations and benefit from becoming a blessed first party utility or feature.
Bartender sold to some sketchy company. We’ve all been moving to the open source Ice app now.
What do you use it for?
Let's see, I have 157 shortcuts defined at the moment. That wasn't due to some mass effort, just a bunch of little things that accumulated over time.
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.
I have tons that solve small annoyances or paper over things I forget. As an example, I listen to an audiobook in audible many nights to sleep, but I often forget to set the sleep timer. Very annoying to have to scrub back hours to find the last thing you remember. I have a shortcut that activates when my iphone is in sleep focus that automatically sets the audible sleep timer for me. It's a little thing, but it's a great quality of life improvement and eliminates my need to think about sleep timers.
Some of my favorite Shortcuts do things like:
- 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.
> turn off Wifi and cellular at the same time (this one's on my homescreen)
Out of curiosity - how is this different from enabling Airplane Mode?
Airplane mode leaves WiFi on.
Not on my 13 mini w/ iOS 18.1, and I don’t remember WiFi ever staying on when enabling airplane mode.
Weird that it seems to be different for different people, though.
According to an help article by Apple [1], if you activate wifi or bluetooth during airplane mode, it will remember that and not disable those when you use airplane mode again. I was also surprised reading your comment as for my phone wifi and bluetooth stay on during airplane mode. I must've activated them once and then it just stayed like that ever since.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-my/guide/iphone/iphb771143ee/io...
I've got a few handy Shortcuts.
• 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.
As a fellow 2012 Denon owner (AVR 3313) you can probably remove the RPi and just use HTTP. Just use devtools on your browser to do an action in the web UI and see what request it sends, then replicate it in shortcuts.
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.
What I originally wanted was just a better web interface. Mine is an AVR 1913, and the web page served by the receiver is kind of slow. The shortcuts came later.
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:
Later when I realized being able to control the receiver from shortcuts would be nice, it was a simple matter to copy the web page source, delete the HTML, replace the form processing with command line processing, and have a command line script for controlling the receiver, and then use the run script via ssh shortcut action to invoke it. It never even occurred to me to consider issuing the commands directly to the receiver from the shortcut.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
The "Get Contents of URL" action does support POST, but the only options it gives for the post data are JSON, Form, and File. For JSON and Form you give it name/type/value triplets and have no direct control of how the post data is formatted. Maybe file would work to get the XML the receiver wants sent but it probably won't have the right content type. I have no idea if the receiver would be OK with that.Shortcuts is pretty hard to use but it is possible to POST. Here's one of my shortcuts https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/81229c80b3ec4c32bec866e2b8f...
> Beats still continues to make slightly cheaper headphones. FoundationDB is still there.
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.
Note how most of them are from the era when Apple cared about software, especially pro software. And how Siri is a barely functioning stagnant service.
You'd be hard pressed to find any more recent success stories.
I didn't know iDVD also came from Astarte. But DVD Studio Pro definitely came from Astarte. And then of course it was discontinued.
You are right: the direct continuity was DVD Studio Pro. iDVD was developed by ex-Astarte people but did not exist before the acquisition.
Shake was a big one. Apple loved to put Lord of the Rings and King Kong on its homepage, but Jobs always seemed pissed that they couldn't dumb Shake down. Artists at Weta, ILM, Etc and others were not about to tolerate a gimped product.
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.
Another controversial one was Lala.com, if I recall right — they shut it down right away, but it had an avid user base.
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.
Shazam is a huge success story!
We'll put Shazam in the Filemaker category of continuing to exist, but not really benefiting from Apple.
It's built in to Siri though. So Apple benefitted from Shazam. I'd say Apple's Weather app has also significantly benefitted (albeit a bit late) from Dark Sky's acquisition
Yes the Weather app has improved but it would have been much better to kill it and start from Dark Sky
Filemaker might as well have been bought when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It's such an acquisition from another era that it's a fully owned-subsidiary of Apple inc. that is completely separate from the rest of the company. Do you know how many other subsidiaries Apple has?
> but not really benefiting from Apple.
It gives Apple the data/insights which new artists are getting popular. Maybe they can use it to negotiate prices with artists.
Been a while since I needed this. Deezer has search built in, and I don't need to switch apps to play/add to a playlist after finding the song.
Shazam's auto-added music to Apple Music for ages. Maybe Spotify too but it's been years since I used that.
In what way, specifically for android users?
In this way https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shazam.and...
For posterity:
> 4.8 star / 10.5M reviews
> 500M+ Downloads
> No data shared with third parties
It (optionally) integrates with the Apple Music Android app now, and offers to add to your library there whenever you scan a song, so I assume it's a good funnel for them to get people into their service ecosystem.
> what other products with users has Apple acquired and shut down?
Shake was acquired in 2002 and killed 7 years later.
It was wild to see Linux and a Pentium III listed as a supported system on an Apple site in 2004.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040613170323/http://www.apple....
Funny how they were selling the Linux version for $2000 more.
OH MY GOD !
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.
To be fair, I think they just left the Linux version at the same price it was when they bought it, but greatly reduced the price of the Mac version.
I totally forgot TestFlight started out third party
As was Siri itself!
FingerWorks! I had their iGesture Pad.
Although maybe they were on their last legs before the acquisition, and it led to multitouch being everywhere, so great outcome anyway.
That iGesture pad was a life saver when I was using a PC at work. I eventually switched to Mac and got used to their trackpad gestures, although I still change the settings to enable 3-finger click-and-drag like the iGesture.
Same with Workflow/shortcuts
The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... most of what you liked about Pixelmator is likely no more over the next year or two. Depending on Apple's reasoning for the acquisition (i.e. how much of it was just for the talent vs the product) you'll may see some small glimpses of Pixelmator's influence a couple years from now in Apple's stuff. Most of the time Apple doesn't keep the acquired product around.
On acquisitions like DarkSky (RIP), sure. This looks a lot more like a Logic-style acquisition.
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"?
And the management team that brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps to this day. Apple doesn't wipe out management during acquisitions, it permanently entrenches them in their structure.
ugh don't get me started about Aperture. I'm still salty about that.
I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc...
Never understood the logic of getting rid of it. I know a few people who actually switched to mac because of Aperture
> I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc...
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.
Yep same here, tried it for a while but Adobe's idea of UI just does not work for me.
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.
> 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.
Someone here mentioned Gentleman Coders Nitro and it looks great so might try that for tagging and smart albums.
It looks very interesting indeed. Thanks for the suggestion!
Yeah the closest I've managed to get is Photos.app with Affinity plugins, and even then its still not as tightly integrated as I'd like.
Claris isn’t really a dumping ground anymore. That’s how it started, but they’ve evolved their own business since then.
Logic and and Final Cut were bought and developed since. Pixelmator fills the open Photoshop space in an Apple way, and will plausibly go the same way — no vague pessimism required.
The (almost) direct counter example is Aperture. That was the “Pro” photo application and it was killed for seemingly no reason with no notice. It’s fairly reasonable to be pessimistic about this acquisition given that history.
Logic and FinalCut are from the time when Apple cared about software and especially pro software.
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 really, really hope you’re right about that.
Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt.
The difference here is how aligned the original team is with their acquirer...down to the corner radius on every button.
With other products like Dark Sky, the product is substantially different in philosophy or design.
The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app and Apple doesn’t actually want to have a separate image editor (let alone two).
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?
This would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app.
Dark Sky would've added more value if they'd just renamed it Weather and made it the built-in app, and yet...
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.
Eh, I don’t think it’s the same thing. The gulf between “photos user” and “pixelmator” user is quite high, much more so than “weather app” and “weather app but better”.
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.
Also remember that some of those have been crippled in the past. iMovie used to be way more advanced. Older versions of Pages had (pretty basic but still) layout options that were completely removed.
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 would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app.
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.
Apple sells Macs. The Mac platform is enhanced by the existence of Pixelmator as an exclusive app.
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.
> The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app
There doesn't appear to be much overlap in terms of functionality.
Hell, if this is true I'd actively celebrate it.
> Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt.
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?
There’s no way Apple can build this. Their human interface people all seem to be gone on the desktop. So many things work so bad these days when they migrated to the new ui framework.
Logic Pro for Mac is regarded very well.
When they make a focused effort in professional software, Apple can deliver.
At the time Apple bought eMagic, Logic's UI sucked. It actually had dialogs that told you to "reboot the dialog for changes to take effect."
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.
Workflow becoming Shortcuts mostly as-is would be a counterexample.
I want to point out that the same management team that brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps. Apple drag and drops teams into their org chart and gives them tons of autonomy.
> The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple...
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.
I don’t understand why companies buy other companies for the talent and not product. Why not just make everyone working there an incredible offer at the same time? It would cost so so so much less than these massive buy outs. Maybe not all of them would take you up on it, but if you buy the company a lot of them may not stick around post-buyout anyway. I feel like this would be a lot more effective also because in a buyout, employees just make the same old salary at the new company. In my method, they make a ton more and are more likely to stay
> Why not just make everyone working there an incredible offer at the same time?
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 :)
it's ridiculous how america is all about free markets except for the instances where rich people could lose money, then suddenly free markets are bad and evil
Which rich people are you talking about, the buyer or the seller? Presumably the buyer of a startup is richer than the startup founders. If poaching all the employees of a company was legal, then we’d end up with only monopolies by the largest and richest, and it would be legal for big companies to crush smaller competition. The playing field in the U.S. and everywhere globally is definitely biased toward the rich, but you’re inadvertently arguing for even greater concentration of wealth, it doesn’t seem like this argument is well thought out.
I wonder what's the theory of harm behind such law. Employers competing over talent is... illegal? Explains a lot actually.
Step 1: make everyone an incredible offer Step 2: get them all hired away from your competitor who is now out of business Step 3: in a year or two, restructure all these people out (or just fire them if your jurisdiction allows) Step 4: your competitor is gone, and all it cost was a year or two of salaries.
Seems like a great way to help out budding monopolies.
it seems like you can just prevent this by providing incentives for your employees to not get poached, and also companies that mass-hire-mass-fire would get reputations for doing so, and people wouldn't fall for it. making it illegal instead of requiring businesses to actually pay for retention and loyalty in a free market way is so silly
When a mass employment offer is made to steal or destroy another business, it's usually something ridiculous. For developers it might be a million a year each, for example. It's not an amount intended to be paid perpetually so it can be larger than the defending business can be paying to retain.
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.
The 'people wouldn't fall for it' is in error. People aren't rational actors and don't have complete information. That's a bold statement, I know, but it's at least as correct as 'people wouldn't fall for it'. I'm pretty sure it's easy to make a case for 'too many people will fall for it'.
america is nothing if not the land of opportunity to make stupid decisions and have to live with the results
You’re assuming that a startup has more money than a larger company. Why?
And since when has a company’s reputation stopped them from doing business?
Multiple reasons. That it does happen should be reason to question your assumptions, rather than assume some obvious imagined alternative has been overlooked by everyone, right?
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.
Unethical by whom? The now richer employees? Or the salty cheapskate?
Investors and founders to name two. Taking over a company via mass poaching would absolutely invite lawsuits.
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.
I'll admit, as an attorney, this isn't my specialty, and every jurisdiction varies, but the ye olde common law of tortuous interference requires something more than mere competition, this is America, not the EU.
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.").
Correct, tortious interference has criteria, and making competing employment offers doesn’t necessarily or automatically meet those criteria, but it could if there are other factors involved. Again, it depends on the situation.
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?
Agree with the other person - there's nothing unethical about hiring people in right-to-work laws and systems however you like. employers can fire at any time with no reason, the reverse also has to be true that they can hire at any time with no reason
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
Like the other person, you’re arguing about individual hires, and not considering the implications of whole-company mass poaching.
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
Ya that’s a solid point. Though many startups give their employees equity options… so you have to factor that in too. Also buying a start up for talent seems risky since many people that join startups are looking for a totally different energy than a large corporation, so it seems reasonable that there’d be a big drop off of that talent as soon as it gets acquired… especially if the vision is not aligned
Sometimes that does happen.
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.
Apple did do that when they were building an electric car: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/apple-s-auto-ambiti...
No, this was a failing business and the employees fled.
Note that this hasn’t happened with Shazam, miraculously
Ok so to be fair.. I own an iPhone for about 3 years now and only discovered it comes shipped with Shazam about 6 months ago and only used it twice since. When I told my wife (also a somewhat long-time iPhone user), she didn’t know it came build-in either.
I’m not a power user, neither is my wife.. I don’t think it is all that well advertised.
Shazam was bought to boost Siri’s ability to recognize music but Siri isn’t really good at much, so it hasn’t been fully absorbed. Now with AI eating the world I assume that functionality will get reproduced by a foundation model and actually integrated into the OS
That's interesting. Is Shazam a default control center button for new phones? I don't remember how mine got there. (There's still probably a discovery issue with those buttons as they're just icons.)
Really? Even though the company is in Lithuania? It seems like they’d probably keep on working on Pixelmator or something closely related since any other teams would be a long way away.
As a longtime user of both:
> 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.
I am a regular runner. The accurate micro-forecasts on Dark Sky were a huge help for me to plan ahead so I wouldn't get caught in the rain. Apple Weather mostly fails at this.
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.
> Apple Weather requires this awkward tap and drag gesture to see actual temperature values through the day.
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.
How does it fail? Are you qualitatively saying it's just...worse?
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.
Weather apps are data visualization apps. Just changing the UI can be a major decrease in functionality
I miss the visualization, but IMO the biggest feature loss is the history feature. You could select any day in the past, even going back decades, and get historical weather information.
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.
> I miss the visualization, but IMO the biggest feature loss is the history feature.
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?
> 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.
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.
Yeah, Apple Weather is not even accurate 95% of the time in north eastern Toronto 1 hour ahead…
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.
> 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.
It happens after multiple refreshes, and it’s just a specific example I chose out of many cases… though it may be possible that the backend server just ignores all that and sends me old data anyways…
Apple Weather is still missing some of the data that Dark Sky exposed, like cloud coverage percentage and other niche info. I also find the UX a little worse, as I like more data at a glance. But you can tell they're using the Dark Sky backend, as it has the same bugs that Dark Sky had, like slowing loading map tiles which sometimes fail altogether. And there was the time they accidentally reenabled the Dark Sky API after an Apple backend deployment. :D
yr.no is the only one that I've found that really does cloud coverage well.
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...
Cloud coverage seems to be back in iOS 18 "Add cloud cover percentage by cloud layer to the current weather forecast"
“cloud coverage percentage”
Have you tried windows?
I was (selfishly) happy with the acquisition because DarkSky didn't support where I live. Now I have hyperlocal rain notifications I didn't get before.
I think weather is ... fine. I liked darksky better, it was more focused and less cluttered. It's purely a design, not functionality thing for me.
Coming from the perspective of a non-DarkSky user, the DarkSky acquisition added tons of value for me. Apple's iOS Weather app is better than it's ever been in terms of accuracy and feature-breadth.
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.
I've heard that Apple Weather is much less reliable nowadays outside of the U.S., but I agree that it's super accurate for me on the East coast of the states.
Late this summer, Apple Weather finally lost me (I'm in Indiana).
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.
Sounds like they truly did incorporate Dark Sky's weather prediction then!
It’s worthless in Thailand. I was checking it last week with a Thai friend here in Bangkok. The forecast was clear skies while in fact we had an epic monsoon storm.
This is typical here.
A fun fact about ITCZ is that you will simply not find a reliably correct weather forecast. In places like Bangkok or (depending on the season) Hong Kong locals normally know to use the weather radar.
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!
I've just learned not to leave the house without an umbrella during the rainy season.
I learned that there’s no umbrella weather. Either rain’s too light, or the damn thing snaps/flies away but the street’s basically a river anyway.
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).
Yeah agree about the flip flops. Especially when you step one of the sidewalk tiles that gushes out a big spout of not very clean water.
If you mention sidewalks, remember cars that splash you with dirty water. You’d think umbrellas are of limited use, until one snaps in the wind and you cut yourself trying to fix it—then you’d hate them!
Apple Weather isn't as accurate as DarkSky used to be for me here in Europe, especially rain prediction.
Apple Weather reliability is an absolute mess since the Dark Sky integration.
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.
I think it's more relevant to ask "Is there any way this can end well?". Unless a company is basically down and out an acquisition, especially by a mega-corp, is basically never going to make things better.
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.
And now seemingly working only on Copilot. The release notes of Visual Studio Code used to begin with accessibility, an indication of commitment to an important pillar of their software. But the KPIs have moved, and now Copiloy takes the spotlight
Why worry about something you have no control over? Keep using it, but be exploring alternatives now in case it does. Don't waste energy fretting over this.
I feel like those ideas are contradictory. Exploring alternatives just in case is wasting energy.
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.
Exploring is not wasted. Fretting is wasted.
It is wasted, because in this situation you’re forced to do it. If you end up not switching, all the time you spent trying something else comes to nothing. If you do switch, you were still forced to spend a bunch of time looking for something.
For me, "nothing" is rarely true. When I've had to learn a tool that operated in a different way, I've often come away realizing that I could think about a common task differently, or that there are capabilities I didn't realize I wanted.
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.
Yes, I agree, “nothing” won’t always be true. But I felt like the idea came across and that having to overly explain and nitpick my own clarification was unnecessary.
Didn’t mean to nitpick, just pointing out a small silver lining.
Edit: and was trying to tie back to the original “Exploring is not wasted. Fretting is wasted.” comment.
Who is "fretting". Someone just asked one question.
Asking a question isn't worrying.
I mean, we're on a forum. There's not much else to discuss on forums than the past and the future.
While I am also very sad about DarkSky, it doesn't always go that way. Shazam was purchased by Apple many years ago, and many people have no idea. It still a stand alone app, but got control center options and Siri integration (even for those who didn't have the app installed). While the app does push Apple Music a bit, it's largely clean and without other ads, which would probably not be the case if they were still on their own.
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.
> Is there any way this can go bad?
6 months they'll realize they can't fit in with Apple's culture and most of the team will hit the road.
You'd assume that their new deal with Apple will involve a certain amount of stock based comp with a cliff. Golden handcuffs.
In view of how AI is changing graphics tools, my guess would be that Pixelmator's pay-once business model didn't bode well for long term competitive viability.
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.
You can get WeatherKit cross platform.
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’s likely that the focus will be less on making power users happy. That’s usually the consequence of such acquisitions.
I can’t think of any Apple software that doesn’t get the job done, isn’t straightforward about its capabilities, and isn’t easy to use. Their whole shtick seems to be just that.
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.
I dunno, I thought "sherlocking" wouldn't be a thing if they acquired instead of duplicating their solution in-house, but it's the same effect, just more equitable to the original creators.
The question usually goes "can this go better ?"
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.
Can't you just zip the current PixelmatorPro.app and use it in case you won't like where things are going?
There's always a way.
On the other hand, does it help to worry? I don't think you can influence Apple.
> Is there any way this can go bad?
Development can stagnate. This isn't a huge trend with apple but it's the obvious answer.
Apple is all-in on services revenue. They could decide to switch this to a subscription model just like their most recent pro apps.
Pixelmator already has been switching products over to subscription.
It looks like they still offer a lifetime IAP, though.
Yeah and I just bought one a month ago… Really sucks, I feel like I probably won’t even get a full year to use it.
I think a company anywhere near the size of Apple being permitted to acquire another company is, in and of itself, bad.
Can you get MyRadar on iphone? It's no DarkSky, but it's the best replacement I've found (for Android at least).
DarkSky wasn’t available in app stores other then US so I don’t even know what are you talking about :(
It started off only using the USA's National Weather Service as a source[0] but gradually added international support[1]. But even then, outside of the US/UK, you would have been better off finding an app that you know uses your region's weather stations.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oliviadam/dark-sky-hype...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190110174010/https://darksky.n...
Nothing beats the buienradar
LOL. Yes, of course. It'll probably go terribly.
apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while. aperture dying was a bummer, and final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them.
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.
Aperture could have been amazing, but it was slow, buggy and suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to - just as Lightroom appeared.
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.
One of the senior Aperture team members went off to use the underlying OS RAW infrastructure in product called Gentleman Coders Nitro. It's a decent but little known Lightroom alternative with no subscription, albeit without all the recent Lightroom AI-infused features. It does have AI masking though.
I bought their previous software "RAW Power", because it was a one-time perpetual license. Then they rewrote the app (it's worse now BTW), rebranded as Nitro, and stopped updating the previous one to be able to charge again.
The Pixelmator team did the same thing with "Pixelmator Classic".
A fantastic product but the colour science does not look great from a first play, and I don't know if seven days is long enough to figure it out. If I had a job I'd pull the trigger anyway, but too much of a luxury right now. I can't believe I did not know about this application. Shocking marketing! :D
omg thanks for the tip! It seems to support iCloud-synched smart albums which is a key feature I've wanted for years since Aperture.
Wow, can’t believe I didn’t find this while looking for Lightroom alternatives several months ago. Looks great!
Amazing, this looks like just what I've been wanting
> FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.
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.
Yea, if Apple is going to want their VR products to succeed they're going to have to rely heavily on some vertical integration on video capture/editing software, and FCPX (and now Pixelmator for the spatial photography efforts) seems like the natural place to put those efforts.
It feels a bit strange though that they made FCP for iPhone/iPad a subscription, and completely separate one from the Mac App.
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.
At this point for video I'm just using DaVinci Resolve which is free except for 8k work and works on windows/mac/linux.
Yeah this. Aperture was a mess. Some of the "full" edit tools from Aperture are actually lurking in Photos which is a fairly competent photo editor on macOS surprisingly.
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.
I was quite surprised (pleasantly) with the editing features available in Photos. I rarely use it on the desktop, and primarily only use it on the device I took the image, but to see how much more in depth the editing was on desktop was one of those that I thought for a second might make me switch to using it for device captured image editing.
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
Yeah I’m currently using lightroom for my mirrorless. I export that to photos then share / keep the flattened images in there.
The no-subscription aspect is a huge differentiator IMO, and depending on situation is even worth trading off features. Losing access to your work because you stopped your Adobe subscription sucks, as does the eventual premium over single-purchase.
Logic is a weird one. It has really truly excellent included instruments (such as Alchemy) and effects, but the app itself feels rather outdated. The mixer, whilst having had some nice features added since Logic 9, is in dire need of an update.
Wouldn't that be a sign of a product that was purchased by Apple and then left to languish as is with just enough effort to not let it rot?
I believe the Logic team are still based in Germany, where the original Emagic team that produced Logic were based, so it's not that they are languishing, but an intentional decision has been made (either by them or Apple) to keep this structure.
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.
Apple bought Logic over 20 years ago. I’d be surprised if it shared any code with the pre-acquisition version.
Why not? Current macOS ships code older than that.
All the AI hubris but Logic still does not do fades or zero crossings when cutting audio clips. And don't get me started on the audio zoom. This is basic stuff!
It feels like the audio code was not touched since emagic days.
In defence of the AI hubris, I laid down a funky rhythm guitar track, verse and chorus, and then fiddled around with the AI bassist and AI drummer and blow-me-down-with-a-feather if the results weren't outstanding. Like a perfect demo. I was able to send that to my mate and say, here you go, here's a demo with guide tracks for the bass.
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/
Huh. Doesn't return to the one, ever? You've got sort of a I - III - IV thing going on, and it just goes to IV and stays there forever. Did you think that was the root?
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 think I played straight into Logic with the metronome on, two sections and then pushed that forward to create some blank bars for the intro and then added the drummer on multiple tracks and same for bassist, then fiddled with some of the settings for each section.
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.
That's astonishing. The best I've ever heard? No. Completely freaking serviceable, especially for a demo? Oh yeah.
I know, it's nuts!
Logic Pro has both of those features: https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/edit-fades-lgcpf7c0... https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/snap-edits-to-zero-...
I am talking about automatically adding fades and/or automatically snapping to nearest zero crossing when cutting audio to prevent clicks.
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
This seems like a very weird hill to die on, specifically concidering this is a feature I would want explicitly off and wouldn't care about existing.
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.
You might be diligent to check your cuts in Sample Editor.
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.
I don't use logic. I find it to be no good but regardless I still wouldn't die on that hill.
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...
Unfortunately I am in position where I have to master mixes done in Logic and this backwards crap can easily add up to half an hour onto every track. Sick of it. Dying on that hill!
I mean put it in your requirements and reject the mix if it contains pops and clicks... Whoever did the mixing has the original with cuts so can add fades much much quicker than you can.
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.
Noted, thank you.
it doesn't? I never heard pops when trimming clips
As a mastering engineer, I am removing them from Logic mixes almost every day. Sometimes I need to pinch myself to reascertain that it's really 2024.
Pedantic note: Alchemy itself was brought in by Apple's acquisition of Camel Audio. So not Apple acquisitions go wrong.
Pros hate UI redesigns
>suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to
How does that happen? Forgetting to periodically save their work and have the app crash, or was it saving incorrectly and producing corrupted files?
Aperture was utterly paranoid about data-loss.
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.
Again, thanks for the interesting insights.
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?
Adobe have (had?) a DNG file-format that encompasses the RAW data, JPEGs and the changes, but by the simple fact that adjustments are application-specific anything you do to modify the image won't be portable. It's basically a TIFF file with specific tags for photography.
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...
Yeah, even DNGs don't really work because as you say, the edits are application specific. My entire workflow converted everything to DNG for about 15 years but now I don't bother.
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?
Aperture always (I think, definitely by 1.5) extracted the IPTC metadata, along with other vendor-specific data from photos. I think (hey, it's almost 20 years ago..) it was 2.0 when we supported XMP. It definitely came in at some time, but it wasn't there at the start and I can't recall exactly when.
Going back to 2007, so can't remember super clearly, but IIRC the db was a sqlite like thing and all info about everything was stored in this, and it was vulnerable to corruption, plus all versions and thumbnails were mixed together with original image files - a total mess. The digital photo management landscape wasn't so mature then, and some people trusted Aperture with their original images whereas later versions allowed or encouraged people to keep their "masters" elsewhere.
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.
Aperture 1.0 was very slow. The stories I could tell about its genesis...
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.
Thanks for the lovely insight, super interesting - I don't think I made it to Aperture 2 - but sounds like some unusual decisions made in that editing process. I suspect, based on my own history with disk problems, that the filesystem issues that would regularly pop up and not dealt with by your average technically-over-trusting student were the root cause, but exacerbated by the choices of image management and application speed.
Apple gained so much professional mindshare in the early 2000s with FCP, Shake, Logic, Aperture, Motion, XSan, XServe, etc. I worked in a graphics/media studio at the time, and the excitement was palpable. And creating things with those apps was just fun.
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.
It seems there was a huge loss of software in the 32bit->64bit switch. Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift (or whatever the specific languages were). FCPX is such a different version than FCP. Just like QTPlayerX is so different than QT Player 7 Pro was such a regression of capabilities. I doubt there was a "this is the best QT Player we've ever released" on that "upgrade".
> Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift
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)
not to well actually you, but i assume you meant objective c? c# is a microsoft thing.
Oh yes
> final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them.
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.
people who work in jobs tend to talk about their tools. i worked in tv for a while a couple decades back, i went to school for film, and thus i have many friends who do creative video editing and professional video editing and still follow the industry closely. i'm not talking about typical social media buzz, i'm talking about "companies moving on to the product" or even "companies continuing to use the product," or professionals choosing to invest in the tool for their work.
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.
My mistake then, I thought you meant a more general social media kind of buzz.
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.
one hundred percent - and i felt like when they initially launched garageband they were doing a great play to get people (particularly folks who dabble and school kids) invested in the logic-style workflow to build up their familiarity so that folks entering the industry would demand it in their workplaces... and then it all just fell off. they actually seemed to want to have that kind of flow in place for basically every kind of professional tool! imovie->FCP and garageband->logic being the prime examples (or maybe only, I guess) that I can think of.
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.)
To the contrary, you want there to be buzz around their new features. As a professional, you need to keep up, and you want new features to reduce your busywork in the app.
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 suppose we need to be more specific about what we mean by buzz.
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 dunno, I'd be more inclined to subscribe to a version of Photoshop CS1/CS2 that runs on modern operating systems where all development effort goes into fixing bugs and improving performance instead of something like current Photoshop CC, where the focus is on gee-whiz gimmicky features. Plugins can fill in for the gee-whiz stuff without turning the core app into a cosmically bloated mess.
10-15 years ago most of the videography freelancers I worked with were on FCP. A few used Premiere. Today, almost all of them are on DaVinci.
My sample size here is small, but yeah, from my horizon FCP is starting to look abandoned.
Still sad that the Apple-award-winning vector drawing program Lineform all-but vanished. (and don't get me started on Freehand being bought by Adobe which is why I need to find a replacement vector drawing tool)
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.
I use Cenon for my CAM. I didn’t realize it was open source and I never expected to hear anyone else mention it.
It's only the drawing portion which is:
https://cenon.info/
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.
That is why I settled on it. The other one I was working with was FabBSD. I still have the source to that it is an OpenBSD focused on CAM. I think the developer lost interest when OpenBSD switched the security model for GPIO.
I think they are both good though.
The abandoning of FCPX after surviving the reputation blow it took during the transition from 7->X is baffling to me. In the mid 2010s it was actually a fantastic NLE, I used it for professional work for a solid decade. When it comes to speed editing there’s just nothing like it. But starting around 2019 or 2020 they just began to let it languish. To say they don’t have feature parity with resolve and premiere is beyond an understatement, whereas they were trailblazing some great stuff previously. Their multi-cam and audio sync’ing was next to none at one time.
I was around there ~2019 the original FCPX design team was purged when the art director from a print magazine took over for the pro apps. He brought in people worked on stuff like the LinkedIn website, ESPN baseball apps and Disney games. Engineers and QA were annoyed having to explain concepts like timecode
Well that certainly explains things lol
It's weird seeing all this discussion of this being a new entry into Apple's pro apps, I'm curious what you folks think Apple has to gain from expanding their pro line up today?
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.)
> it feels like something they'd be well-positioned to seriously take on if they invested heavily in it.
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.
> A similar example is the iWork suite. It exists, but neither users nor Apple seem to care about it.
I would disagree on that, at least about Keynote. I’m not the only one who loves it.
Keynote thrives because Apple does their in-person stage presentations using it.
They need something to handle that... and because it's Apple they won't use PowerPoint.
Logic is stellar. Why would you feel like its being abandoned? Professional tools don't change UX every 2 years.
Logic falls into a weird space between pro (studio) software and home studio software. Professional studios mostly use Pro Tools and Cubase (Europe). Home users mostly migrated to Live. It's obviously an oversimplification but it does reflect the problem Logic is facing.
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.
There's some other places that migrated to Reaper because of its own specialties. Reaper runs great and is absurdly, unreasonably customizable.
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.
Interesting, that's a very cool idea! I tried Reaper when it was released but didn't find a good reason to move away from Pro Tools. That was a very long time ago though. What's the best community for sharing ReaScripts? Also, is your script available anywhere?
Apple is clearly investing in it, but for whatever reason it's simply not got the foothold it once had and they don't seem super interested in pushing it and people aren't using it. I feel like it's substantially less prominent in the industry than it was a decade or two ago, I see it in far fewer studios (or, even further I'll say I literally have not seen anyone using it in person in the past ten years, which is a marked change.) For a very long time, I feel like cubase/logic/pro tools were The DAWs That People Used. Logic doesn't seem to be appealing to new producers as much and it doesn't seem like Apple is as invested in pushing or promoting it as it used to be. I might be wrong, though!
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.
My guess is that this a purchase of what will become the ever missing “MS Paint.”
It’s kinda wild that macOS bundles Garage Band but doesn’t come with anything for graphics.
OS X used to have iPhoto, which was a really decent app in the days of early digital photography. Until Apple decided to replace it with a more "streamlined" Photos app, by removing a lot of features.
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?
fwiw, you're forgetting Mainstage, which is the defacto industry standard (alongside Ableton, to an extent) for live performance. There's a cottage industry of Mainstage session sales and sound design that is funded by basically every theater production in the United States from high school to Broadway which is wild if you think about it.
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.
Logic is still solid, they even added audio stem decomposition in Logic Pro 11 recently.
that is a very fun feature - reminds me of the excitement I used to have with new versions of software...
> ideally not-subscription-based competitor
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.
apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while
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.
Well done team Lithuania! Remember hearing Pixelmator founders giving a speech ~12 years ago. They were very vocal and repeated this many times: "Our marketing strategy is to just focus on the product". Not sure I agree with that statement, but they sure seem to followed it thoroughly. Congrats on the acquisition!
> "Our marketing strategy is to just focus on the product".
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.
People tend to forget that product is one of the Ps
Marketing is not the same as promotion
Nice change of pace from the current zeitgeist of, "you should really be Extremely Online to have a chance!" that is oft-repeated by...Extremely Online people.
I use it for ages, and did not get to know it through promotion or advertisement or campaign but reputation. And I stayed, updated not because some chatter buzz or famousness or other face matter but because it was good for me. Their strategy worked then and there.
Time and patience pays when you have a great product.
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.
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'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.
I'm half unsurprised as Pixelmator was one of the apps that was extremely-tightly-integrated with Apple's APIs and ecosystem and was an excellent app as a result, and half worried that Apple will make unpopular changes to it as it's a less user-friendly app by necessity. (see also recently: Apple's Dark Sky acquisition and the worse integration of it into the Weather app)
The other half of this equation is Sketch. Pixelmator is great for photos, Sketch is great for vectors and UI design. Both committed to being first-class macOS applications. But Sketch has steadily been losing ground to Figma. I wonder if an acquisition is on the cards there as well?
I'd actually like to see that happen I think. For my use cases Sketch is infinitely better than Figma. Figma is an abomination of an app.
Figma to me feels geared toward collaborative prototyping specifically. It’s kinda clunky and awkward for creation of graphical assets, which is where I find Sketch a lot nicer.
I adore Sketch, but the industry standard has been Figma. It's a web app and it beats the pants of Sketch for collaboration.
> Pixelmator was one of the apps that was extremely-tightly-integrated with Apple's APIs and ecosystem
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.
I don’t think this will be good for users, but I do think this is the right call at the right time for the company. They get (presumably) top dollar for their outfit prior to the next big market crash, and just as investor funding is drying up outside the AI realms. Hopefully everyone involved gets enough dosh to live comfortably, and can focus on their next big passion or project once the NDAs and Non-Competes run their course.
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.
For what it's worth: a friend of mine has extracted the Fuji LUTs from the "official raw converter" and has been using them in darktable happily ever after ;)
I’ll have to try the same, then! Love my Fuji cameras, just don’t want to lose the official LUTs.
Check Affinity, they have a top product for developing and editing.
It's owned by Canva now though, so I don't have any more faith in it.
oh dang, that went by me completely, TIL!
I really hope Photomator/Pixelmator won't get absorbed into the Photos app, now knowing that Affinity has also been gobbled up :(
Same! I had immediately considered it to switch to, and then learn that. Nothing is sacred.
i tried them with fuji 50mb raw files, it was super slow compared to capture one
Pixelmator is my favorite photo editing tool. It’s like Photoshop without the baggage/subscription and is perfect for the types of edits I need to do. I’m cautiously optimistic about this acquisition, I almost hope Apple just makes it free as part of the iLife suite (or whatever it’s called now).
I bought and used Pixelmator a long time ago, but stopped right after Affinity Photo (and Designer) came out. I didn't follow its development very closely since then. Has anyone used both Pixelmator and Affinity Photo recently? I'd appreciate some comparison here.
I’ve used both extensively since release. Anything but Adobe.
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.
Very interesting move. Adobe must be trembling.
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).
I'm not a fan of Adobe at all but I used to do a lot of work in Photoshop. The top features for nearly 30 years have not been the destructive editing portion of the app but the composition tools.
By composition tools I mean the layer, channel, and layer effects tools. Layer effects/adjustments and masks make for easy compositing and live readjustment. It's the live nature of these features which is helpful because you're having to constantly refine the look of things based on a client's feedback. Photoshop manages to handle all sorts of layering while still providing color correct output.
It's not glamorous but it's important and most supposed Photoshop competitors over the decades fail at it. Some tools do many of the same things but I don't know of apps that can do everything Photoshop does it that space.
It's fine to snipe at Photoshop users that only have very basic needs for which Photoshop is overkill. I don't do anything graphic design anymore so Pixelmator and Affinity Photo have my needs covered. I purchased both and they've been well worth the money. But if you want to actually go after professional Photoshop users, not just incidental users, you really need 100% of Photoshop's functionality. Otherwise you'll miss a must-have feature that some designer requires for their workflow.
As much as I've enjoyed Pixelmator it's not even 50% of Photoshop's capabilities. It's not even on par with the decades old Photoshop 6.
I agree. The feature that keeps me using Illustrator vs all the other vector graphics apps is group isolation. Nobody has implemented this properly and it's a deal breaker since my vector workflow relies on groups instead of using layers.
OTOH it could very well be that Apple intends to invest into Pixelmator and make it a pro app.
Time will tell.
Adobe is at a weird place.
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.
Every time they try to bump me up to a higher plan I tell them that I don't need it any more and it's too expensive and they give me stupid deals. I think currently I'm paying $25 a month but they refunded me the first month where I accidentally lapsed back onto the "real" pricing, and gave me the next four months for free. So basically $175 for the year. I'll probably cancel it next time it comes up though, I basically only use it for complicated PDF stuff, and I'm sure I can find something else to do that.
This is basically it, just complain and they'll cut you a deal.
How are you grandfathered? Fake student ID?
You just tell them that you don't find it valuable and if you've been a customer for long enough they will bend over backwards to keep you. I used to buy several copies of CS3 and CS4 back when they came on DVD and I'm still using the same account, and moved to subscriptions with three seats as soon as they came in. So my LTV is probably fairly compared to a normal "consumer" account where they've only ever subscribed. Obviously compared to an enterprise account it's nothing, but if you're buying enterprise licensing I imagine you're getting it for less than $30 per seat per month.
yet building an adobe alternative could be daunting. Even for Apple. Adobe products have been polished for decades. IMHO Taking on Adobe is as hard as a another company taking on Apple by building apple like products.
Calling Adobe apps polished is a hot take. Adobe products are houses that have been added onto until the learning curve on their apps is similar to that of taking up playing a pipe organ.
You can't polish a turd, Beavis.
Weird, because the overlap between After Effects and Resolve is insignificantly small. Anyone using AE for post-processing only has been in the wrong app for years already.
plenty of people doing motion graphics with Resolve
and now Rive is really taking the 2D world by storm
Some people may not be familiar with the fact that BlackMagic Design incorporated its motion graphics and VFX package, Fusion, into Resolve a few years ago. It's an incredibly powerful compositing package, though its node-based architecture may present a nontrivial learning curve for people accustomed to the pre-comping workflow of AE.
> node-based architecture may present a nontrivial learning curve for people accustomed to the pre-comping workflow of AE.
I'd also emphasize that node-based compositing is more suited to VFX and layer-based compositing to motion graphics.
Do you have a source for folks doing motion graphics with Resolve? Always curious to hear more data points on this. The impression I have from reading online is I'd be shocked if they had over 1% of the market, but it's purely anecdotal.
Sorry no data points, just what I've seen first hand.
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.
If you don't mind sharing I'd love to hear which industry you're in. What I typically hear is advertising is Premiere, Hollywood is Avid, and Resolve is taking over prosumer/smaller shops (although still AE for any remotely sophisticated motion graphics/2D work). And Nuke for VFX compositing. I've actually never heard of Fussion itself being being popular for anything actually, 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.
Personally I'm mostly in web dev but I work with design shops, agencies, etc. I also do audio production, photography, and some video. But you're right that I'm in contact with small creative shops (less than 50 people).
> 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).
Interesting, especially that last bit. Thank you for taking the time to share!
I would be shocked if Rive had even 1% of the DAU that After Effects does.
I agree but it's getting better every day and the growth has been phenomenal. Just look at the number of tutorials on youtube etc.
> Adobe must be trembling.
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.
> If Microsoft acquired Affinity next
They have already been acquired (by Canva) earlier this year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39824191
I’ve never seen a graphics person using a windows machine in all my years in tech…
Maybe I’m in some sort of bubble.
I guess it depends where you work. In CAD and 3D animation work, Windows machines outnumber the Macs I see 10:1. In smaller shops this ratio probably flips around but Adobe (and others) have a large and captive contingent of Windows users to profit off.
Adobe doesn't offer CAD and 3D animation products.
[(and others)]
"graphics people" aren't the core people using Adobe's products though. As evidenced by the terrible designs people keep cranking out using photoshop. And by the huge market for terrible-design-by-numbers Canva.com
Yes you are. You probably live in the US, Canada or the UK.
We all live in our own bubbles. I never saw a tech person using MacOS, it's always Windows or Linux - I assume that's not your experience either (and I only know a few people using MacOS privately). That probably mostly depends on the country one resides in.
Well, the view laid out here also corresponds to actual statistical reality: About 29% of developers reported using Macs (of any kind) as of a few years ago, it's not even close to "most", as some HN visitors would have you believe. The bubble is very real.
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.
I've been forced to use Windows in the creative graphics world. Back long ago in the dark ages, I did layout/graphics for a 'zine that was all done on Windows NT with Adobe software delivered to press on a Syquest disk.
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??
I have but it was corporate, fintech setting where Windows stations rule the place. She was a really good graphics designer too. Surprised me as well.
Really? I worked in Hollywood for many years and all the color grading and photo editing was done on PCs with Sony professional color grading monitors, which weren't supported right on Macs.
Pixelmator could never compete with Adobe. Their expertise is on Mac and until now they didn't have the resources to make a big product like Photoshop or Illustrator (at some point they shared the idea of making a vector graphics product but it was abandoned).
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.
Affinity was acquired by Canva.
Yep, I wish Apple had acquired them instead. Canva is.. not a good company.
Canva left the buy once affinity model untouched, and are an ethical company.
Curious why you think Canva isn't a good company?
I don't think Apple bought this to mothball it. That only makes sense if it competes with your own products. Which this doesn't.
I think the point was that cross-platform is mothballed now, there probably won't be a windows version of pixelmator now.
There never was going to be one. The pixelmator team is deeply steeped in the Apple world, and I seriously doubt they'd ever consider Windows.
What if it becomes another iMovie or Garageband?
This is in no way a criticism of the news, but if Pixelmator isn't for you, consider trying Acorn, developed by the reputable indie developer Gus Mueller:
https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
It aligns better with my concept of an image editor, based on my experience with Photoshop 4.x-6.x and The Gimp.
+1 for Acorn, and also check out Retrobatch by the same developer - it's a super powerful image processing environment - the way I'd describe it is like having a visual command line dedicated to image processing (but better because it's visual and you don't have to read man pages).
Great work all around by Gus Mueller.
Thanks! Pixelmator just didn't click for me. Hotkeys were different and it felt like it operated slightly differently from old school Photoshop.
Gus has personally responded to every bit of feedback I’ve submitted, with quick turnaround for bug fixes and thoughtful engagement with suggestions.
Acorn strikes the right balance for me of simplicity vs richness of features.
I got both when they were very cheap, and I stuck with Pixelmator. It felt best for me. But ... I'm a casual user. No clever or subtle edits.
I bought Pixelmator nearly a decade ago for my Mac, when I needed a decent image/photo editor. I hope they make Pixelmator free, as mac definitely needs a good default image editor that is more advanced than Preview.
I bought the first version but skipped out on the last one. I think they'll go the way of Final Cut Pro with this.
wow, something I know a lot about. I used to work on the Photos Edit team at Apple.
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!
Huge congratulations team, you were always one of the few Lithuanian companies I'm proud to talk about.
Didžiausi sveikinimai!
Man, I don’t think this will be good for users.
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.
The issue with Windows support for tools like Pixelmator is that a great many of its features are wrappers around OS level image manipulation libraries that come with macOS/iOS - Windows doesn't have anything like the rich image manipulation libraries built in that macOS has, so to get feature parity would very likely involve building from scratch a ton of the stuff they didn't have to do on macOS. The Pixelmator developers have said this before in their own support forums too when question of Windows/Linux support is asked.
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.
I always assumed Apple's strategy in building Core Image was to encourage developers to create image editing apps so they didn't have to. Plant the seeds and watch the flowers bloom. Perhaps it hasn't happened in quite the way they hoped.
Why do you say Affinity sold out?
They sold to Canva, which is strictly subscription based. As far as I know there haven’t been negative changes yet, but we’re still in the period before we’d see them.
Did you see the statement from Canva and Serif after those kinds of rumors started circling? They made a strong statement that they aren't making Affinity apps subscription or dissolving the teams on those apps. It's not the usual silence on post-acquisition plans.
Makes sense. I'm a pretty casual user of Pixelmator Pro but it really does feel like a first party Apple app.
It does, and this makes me nervous that they’ll screw it up. I’m a user of Apple Logic Pro and they’ve done a decent job of keeping it going for what, fifteen plus years? But I can’t offhand think of any other popular acquisition that they’ve improved upon and the kept improving off the top of my head (I’m sure there’s more that I’m not thinking of, maybe CUPS) without just sorta forgetting. At least there’s still Acorn.
The "Shortcuts" app was an acquisition and is fairly powerful as a graphical system automation app. I created a shortcut that looks up the overnight weather at my home, and determines if it needs to turn on the AC to run for ~30 minutes before I go to bed so the room is comfortably cool.
Best photo editing tool out there for most people. Incredible interface design and integration with the OS.
And such a natural fit of acquirer. This makes total sense and I'm excited to see what comes out of this!
Pure speculation: This is about visionOS. Photo editing is the least friction "pro" task to bring to a spatial computing platform.
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.
I think Pixelmator probably already runs on visionOS (I don't have one personally) but I doubt they spend enough engineering resources to make it amazing because the ROI isn't worth it for a third party company. But of course Apple can make Pixelmator amazing on visionOS without even noticing the cost.
Hasn't Apple just discontinued Vision Pro?
They have not. They stopped production on the current version of the hardware, which is not the same thing as discontinuing the product.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41925006
There have been a couple of bits in the news about Vision Pro, the specific hardware product. Nobody knows their plans for the future of the platform as a whole though. They just hosted a developer event for visionOS a few weeks ago https://www.toddheberlein.com/blog/2024/10/3/a-cozy-wwdc
They literally just released it in two more countries this week. So no.
Did they? Do you have a link? All I can find is some rumors about reducing production.
They didn’t. The thing you found about reducing production is likely what GP is thinking of. The headlines had several people thinking the same as them on first read.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41925329
Astonishingly to me at the time, the app never had a History function (as in Photoshop, list of history you could click through). I had been waiting 3+ years for it to materialize, in order to purchase it. Have since moved on to vector editors and don't see a need to go back.
*Actually now that I think about it, I don't seem to miss the lack of History in vector editors (and just use undo).
Will fit right in with iMovie, which doesn't allow you to select the resolution of the exported video. It's like the island of misfit apps.
iMovie lets you select the resolution. File > Share > File, and the dialog that pops up has a picker for resolution right underneath the picker for format.
It defaults to the maximum resolution of the first clip that you import. So if you import a 720p movie first and want to export to 4k later on, you can't. You can export smaller but not larger. To export at 4K, you have to get rid of everything, import a 4k clip, and put everything back. And even then, resolutions are preset, you can't do a custom resolution.
I think “iMovie can’t upscale” is a lot more accurate then. “iMovie doesn't allow you to select the resolution” is very misleading, because it does allow you to do that.
No, it's not just about upscaling, please re-read what I wrote. iMovie can upscale. You just have to trick it into doing so, because you can't set the resolution. Also, you are limited to the 720, 1080, 4k etc. If you want to export a square movie you can't. Best option is to export from iMovie and crop it in iPhoto.
> you can't set the resolution
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.
Okay so how do I set the resolution of an output video to 100 x 100 in iMovie?
(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.
Hopefully they will use the Pixelmator remove object model in photos since it is so much better than the Apple one in 18.1.
I am fearing that Photomator+Pixelmator get absorbed into the Photos app, but I'm clinging onto the small slimmer of hope that, instead, they'll become entries into the Apple "Pro-Apps" family (next to FCPX, Logic, etc).
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?
My initial assumption is that this is more about Photomator than Pixelmator (ie. their Lightroom alternative rather than their Photoshop alternative).
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)
Hopefully Apple doesn't ruin this, but I assume that it will be infested with Apple AI features sooner than later. Oh well, at least Pixelmator Pro is not a subscription service, so it will last me for a while even if that becomes the case.
Pixelmator already has plenty of "machine learning" features that work well.
>it’s crazy what a small group of dedicated people have been able to achieve over the years from all the way in Vilnius, Lithuania
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.
Yeah, it’s a silly segway. The team could have moved somewhere “safe” at any time before the acquisition lol. I’m from the Baltics as well, we are not moving anywhere from our land, photo editing features can wait.
Just curious but what makes a non-Photoshop photo-editor tool "good"? Aside from AI fill, it seems like the fundamentals of this space haven't changed much since CS6 for 90% of design usecases.
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
I'm still on Pixelmator classic 3.9 (it's what I have a license for) and it's great. Does everything I need easily as a casual user, and it hasn't changed in years! I've never even thought about upgrading.
The upgrade is worth it for vector image editing.
Really glad for them. Pixelmator Pro is my go-to image editing software. Reminds me of Fireworks (which I really liked, but then Adobe happened) with slightly worse vector functionalities.
Curious if anybody has a good “combined” editor to suggest.
Interesting, and congrats to the Pixelmator team.
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?
This is both simultaneously surprising (given how long they’ve been in the perfect space to acquire) and unsurprising (given that they’re a perfect fit)
Really looking forward to what comes out of this.
I love Pixelmator Pro, especially because of no subscription fee. If you own Pro for more than 4 months you're spending less money than you would on Photoshop!
They had switched their Photomator spinoff to subscription pricing in 2022: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/wrieaa/pixelmator_ph...
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-...
It's the sweet spot for me. I don't edit images for a living, but I push pixels around enough for hobbies (e.g. making video game maps) that I want something user friendly and pleasant. Pixelmator Pro has way more features than I'll ever need or use, and all the ones I do need are ergonomic to me, a person who doesn't have decades of Photoshop muscle memory.
This is the market GIMP needed to fill but doesn't. It's definitely capable but it's never been "friendly and pleasant" to my eye.
I used GIMP for years and years before Pixelmator came around, and the first time I tried Pixelmator was the last time I used GIMP.
As others here mentioned, Krita is also much nicer. If Pixelmator didn't exist it's probably what I'd use instead.
Paint.NET fills that market also, but it's Windows-only shareware.
Krita feels like GIMP done right to me,
I am using both[1] and I never understood these kind of comments. Their UI is so similar.
[1] Krita more as paint tool on my Lenovo Yoga, Gimp more as an editing tool on other computers.
As long as there continue to be tutorials for how to draw a circle in GIMP, they will not seem alike to me.
With apple giving away garageband for so long, I was always surprised that they didn't have a decent graphics editor option, so this makes a lot of sense to me.
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 am dying to ditch Adobe and Lightroom (both Classic or CC) but none of the alternatives (Photomator included) seem to have the same quality of library management features as Lightroom (metadata editing, rating, keywords, face recognition etc.). Have any enthusiast photographers actually found a decent replacement?
Try nitro. Only macOS at the moment, but such an impressive alternative
Combining Pixelmator and Procreate via airdrop is such a nice workflow. I'm happy for the team and I'm holding out hope this will be good for Mac users in the long run. A Blackmagic acquisition would also be interesting. It's too bad there isn't a vector drawing app that's at the same level of Mac integration as Pixelmator. I've used Inkscape and it was amazing but unfortunately very slow.
Sketch might be what you’re looking for:
https://www.sketch.com
I am extremely fond of Pixelmator -- I bought the original maybe twelve years ago, and Pixelmator Pro as soon as it came out.
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.
Love that app, and when they first came out their UI/UX was better than Apple. I remember seeing their dark panels styling and thinking it was sleek and ahead of its time, Apple adopted that same look and feel not long after with their pro apps.
Congrats to the Pixelmator team!
Adobe is going online as in Photoshop will be browser based in the future as they already have a beta version. The days you have an Adobe desktop app that sends data to the cloud will be over in probably 10yrs. Sure they will probably make an "local desktop app" the same way Figma does, but it won't be a true desktop app anymore.
This seems like it would be a good match, except that Apple has a history of "odd" decisions when it comes to in-house software, from HyperCard to Claris Works to Final Cut Pro to Aperture. If I relied on Pixelmator, I would be at least a little bit worried.
Can someone give some insight why acquisitions like this happen? Is it to take over the user base or is it actually about the product itself?
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.
Apple can bring in new users beyond Pixelmator's wildest dreams. This is definitely a product/talent acquisition. And Pixelmator has almost 2 decades worth of development already baked in, not sure how anyone can do it cheaper.
2 decades worth of development usually also mean 2 decades worth of tech debt.
Most time consuming part of development of old software is trying to go around limitations inherited from past decisions.
The greatest news for customers is that Adobe aren't the ones buying it
RIP Macromedia Fireworks
Man do I ever miss Fireworks. And Dark Sky for that matter.
Fireworks really was it though.
I miss Photoshop 5. That's why I was so happy to discover and use photopea.com now :)
Still running CS2 from an old ripped disc over here. Does 95% of what I need.
My hat's off to you sir! I wish I could do it, but at some point MacOS moved on and My CS5 would crap out on me. Glad I found a clone online
CS5 predated Retina display support too
Graphite looks like a promising alternative to Fireworks for combining vector and raster graphics. I'm looking forward to the desktop version.
Idk, Apple is just as likely to kill it.
Much, much more likely. The only acquisition I can think of that Apple has allowed to continue to exist is Shazam.
Emagic's Logic is the pro software example. But they've killed others, like Chalice and RAYZ (purchased from Silicon Grail) were killed before Apple released Motion, and Nothing Real was purchased for Shake which was killed 6 years later.
The only acquisition? Emagic, the original maker of Logic was acquired some 20 years ago and now Logic is one of if not the flagship software product sold by Apple
My ability to think of examples obviously isn't that great.
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.
Anyone remember Siri Assistant...?
And Siri and Shortcuts.
I was worried Workflow was totally screwed as a product after Apple bought it, but they've done a really great job at turning it into Shortcuts and integrating it across all their platforms.
Being able to put Shortcuts into Control Center in iOS 18 is a handy option, if anyone missed that you can do that now.
Though way less likely to turn it into a cursed subscription zombie.
Leaving aside pricing specifics, the main issue with subscriptions is for products that you just fire up once in a great while. So long as the pricing is reasonable, I have no particular issue with subscriptions for products I use on a routine basis--especially if they're products that more or less require ongoing updates to remain useful.
For me personally, Pixelmator is absolutely a product I just fire up once in a great while. I bought it anyway because when I need it, I need it. But there's no way I would let a program like that deflate my bank account like a pricked balloon.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me. I do subscribe to Photoshop mostly because Lightroom makes sense as a subscription. Otherwise I'd probably make do with GIMP or maybe something like Pixelmator. (I used Photoshop Elements for a long time.)
It doesn't appear that I am. All I meant to add is that if Apple turns Pixelmator into a "cursed subscription zombie" (and I very much doubt this will happen) then I will not be getting that subscription. I expect most people wouldn't either.
Interesting! Do you think a credits-based pricing would be more fair? Only pay for it when you use it? Maybe pay per click? Maybe like how cloud providers charge based on how long you have it open?
Metered pricing is basically cloud pricing. Probably reasonable for some uses but uncommon for applications at least with major providers.
Hasn't Apple gone the subscription route for ipad apps (I am fairly sure I read somewhere that Logic for iPad is subscription based)?
Why would they kill it? Is Apple in the graphic design business today?
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.
Doubtful. It might get worked into iPhoto or a new version of Aperture as part of their pro apps.
That would be a nice outcome. I’ve been missing a replacement for Aperture for years. I’m not a professional photographer, but I’ve got more than 30 years of photos inside of Apple Photos. Some old school scans or Photo CDs, some RAW from underwater (Photos does a poor job here), and a ton of iPhone photos.
Bringing a more premium experience to Photos would be a great complement to how you can already shell out to Pixelmator while editing photos.
The big thing Aperture nailed though was photo-management workflows - it was never that great as an image editor. I don't see anything in Pixelmator that moves the needle in an Aperture/Lightroom-type direction by integrating photo management, which was the innovation Aperture and Lightroom brought back at their roughly similar original launch dates. Pixelmator is much more a photoshop alternative IMO.
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.
Some time ago they split off Photomator as a more Aperture/Lightroom app.
Ah interesting, hadn't seen Photomator before. That does appear to indeed bring a more Aperture type experience to the editing process.
How is that different from what I said?
It would be a different name or form but it would not be dead.
Incorporating some features into an already existing product of their own is still killing the acquired product line.
I spent a lot of time in the early 2000 with Macromedia apps.. i miss Director
I always loved pixelmator and they deserve it. 100% of it! Never greedy, ui and ux top notch and I never missed Photoshop once. I’m of course a little scared of its future but I hope Apple will just integrate it inside the new OS updates. Thank you Pixelmator team!!
As a long time Pixelmator user, this really worries me. I loved DarkSky and then Apple acquired and killed it without a good replacement (I switched to Wunderground because Apple Weather is inaccurate, especially for precipitation predictions).
Would be cool to see this slotted in as a more advanced photo editing product akin to Aperture back in the day.
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.
At the same time, they don't really have anything like this in their portfolio in terms of Keynote/Pages/Numbers.
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 wonder if this is also their play to offer some options for generative AI, without necessarily going against their current statements related to Photos where they don’t want to fundamentally change what a photograph is.
Bummer. I switched to Affinity (Photo, Designer) this year and am very happy. You can buy a lifetime license across all platforms (iPad, Mac, Windows) for a fixed price. It is great to have high quality software that is not a subscription.
I am not a fan of subscriptions but old versions of Photoshop were also lifetime licenses and a 10y old professional software still works exactly the same now as 10 years ago. Yet I don't see much professional gfx artists and workers claiming they are still using the old licensed software instead of whining about the sub. Is this trolling or are people just slave of the lure of the newest and latest?
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.
> 10y old professional software still works exactly the same now as 10 years ago
Great point for Windows. iOS, Mac, and Linux evolve too much to reliably run 10 year old binaries.
you can usually get away with it by chrooting an old release of a distro that has contemporary libs. And this is rarely needed as you usually have the sourcees available under a free license which allows you to recompike and/or port it.
We are talking photoshop anyway so it isn't relevant in that case.
This would be a great acquisition for Apple if they were to use the patents (if any) owned by Pixelmator and the team behind it to work on Apple's Photos app for the next year, now that Apple Intelligence is out in Beta.
Even if there’s a risk of a “Dark sky” outcome, I’m still happy, because I figured that Pixelmator was at long term risk of getting squeezed in the photo-editing market. It’s just tough for indie devs playing with the big boys.
Great news. Hopefully this will drive enough improvements to finally get me off adobe. Photomator is nearly good enough to replace Lightroom and Pixelmator is much nicer than photoshop for casual users.
As a Pixelmator lover, I pray that Apple does not - kill it as they killed Aperture - slow down the development to a glacial pace ‘enjoyed’ by their other prosumer software
The best company that could have acquired them. A rebirth of Apple professional tools is desperately needed. Hopefully this is the start of more attention in that direction.
Wow love pixelmator! Great for team but Uncertain for product.
Why is this big news? What exactly is Pixelmator? What I've been able to gather is that it's basically Photoshop, but I didn't get if it's just "yet another Photoshop" or if it has some very unique niche where it's popular or something.
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.
Love the product, as a casual user of light photo editing it’s allowed me to get rid of Adobe.
I hope they integrate this as a free first class citizen into iOS and MacOS
Anything that helps avoid Adobe is more than welcome.
Maybe this acquisition keep Adobe up late at night for the coming years.
I can never forgive them for making creative cloud such a stupid expensive subscription.
Not surprising at all. Their website already looked like Apple.
Jokes aside, this has been long overdue. Hope the products will survive somehow.
There is a lot to do to make it more user friendly. That's where the first changes will be made if I have to guess.
One of the best purchases I've made. Ridiculously cheap for the features it provides. Hope apple doesn't ruin it.
Call me jaded but
> 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.
I think this has happened enough times for it to no longer be a “jaded” view, it is the empirically supported view.
There’s a great Tumblr that tracks this exact phenomenon
https://www.tumblr.com/ourincrediblejourney
How can I read this without making an account?
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I don't think that's universally true though. An example would be Logic, which Apple kept improving after buying it and it's still a great piece of software.
[flagged]
If tech moguls have shown us one thing, it is that money beyond one's wildest dreams is still not enough to be happy.
never has been.
The Craiglist guy and the MySpace guy beg to differ.
and/or other people reflective of a non-heteronormative worldview.
Are they acquiring the company to get the app, or are they acquiring the company to hire the people?
Photomator has everything I need in a Lightroom replacement. I hope Apple takes and uses it all.
I can't wait for the pixelmator tools to be subsumed into Preview.
Great timing. I _almost_ bought a perpetual license last week. Now I know I'll wait.
Excellent program, the only real competitor to Photoshop. I kinda liked that they were independent.
> We want to give a big thanks to our amazing users for your support over the past 17 years.
Wow I feel old :)
Apple got scared: if Canva moves Affinity Suite to the web then that makes Apple computers less valuable unless you pay up for Adobe Creative Suite.
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.
Hm? The Affinity Suite already works on Windows, which is realistically Apple's competitor in this space. The only platform moving to the web would enable is Linux and the BSDs, and while that would be great, I don't understand how you think it'd scare Apple?
Sveikinimai!
Well, hopefully now Macs can finally ship with a paint app.
Great news for Pixelmator group/founders (probably a decent exit package). Not sure how I feel about the end user experience owned by Apple though.
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
Killed but what did they do with the tech? Did it find its way into something else? The Apple Weather app has seen lots of positive development that I've assumed was integration of Dark Sky into their app rather than keeping it a separate app.
Did Pixelmator changed the title of the post or was it editorialised?
I hope this means that we get a photoshop competitor in the pro-apps line.
Whoa, nice. I’ve purchased Photomator while it was just a couple of euros.
Fantastic piece of software. Congrats to the Pixelmator team
I have owned pixelmator apps for years and love this decision
What can Pixelmator be possibly doing that Apple cannot?
Well deserved. Congratulations to the Pixelmator team!
Big up to the team. Great work over the years.
My guess is Vision Pro port coming.
at this point it is what ai can do for you - no serious m&a without it
RIP Pixelmator.
For how much?
BRING BACK APERTURE YOU COWARDS
Congrats team Pixelmator.
can we re-release the modal version? LOVE full modal apps!
Valio lietuviams!
ultimate goal when submitting to app store, congrats
I know this isn't likely... but a part of me is going, "and so the downfall of Adobe supremacy begins..." evil cackling
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)
One can only hope.
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.
pixelmator's great. congrats!
Sveikinimai broliams ir visam kolektyvui!
So, another subscription service?