So has anyone put it through its paces? Thoughts? I'm curious.
It still has its rough edges and bugs. But for a 1.0 release, it's fantastic. If the bugs can be ironed out fast and if the dev team starts adding wanted features, this app could become a great Photoshop alternative.
I'm a bit disappointed the dev team decided to create a custom interface for the palettes and document windows but whatever.
If the 2 brothers developing this are serious about their work, this app will really shine in a year. I followed the development a bit and I'm somewhat amazed at how fast the known bugs were fixed and how fast the features were added.
One show-stopper bug though has to be the undo support. It looks like some operations are not undoable making the undo sequence go haywire. I won't go into further details but I can say that once the bugs are squashed, this app will really shine. The team seems to be off to a good start fixing bugs rapidly and adding features.
Like the app, but still hate them name. Too late now though I suppose. They should have got Sebastiaan (no, not Slewis, different one) to do the icon work and called it Acorn . Much better name and icon. Kind of like Newsfire, great app, name, bad icon - well more so the icon in that case. Disco is a prime example how important this stuff is.
The only thing that disappoints me right now is how the developers aren't thinking outside the box. They're mostly looking at Photoshop and copying what they see. There's a bit of originality in their work but not as much as I'd hope.
I really hope they put in live feedback on things like the gradient tool, the paint bucket, and the magic wand. The filters are rendered live thanks to CoreImage but they also need something similar to the alpha tool in iWork and Preview 4.0 (Extract by Color and Extract by Shape) where you click on a colored background of the image and drag out to decrease tolerance.
Instead of doing a trial and error tolerance slider dance, you click and drag on a color to remove that color...it's so simple it makes me cry. Same with Extract by Shape, instead of a tiny lasso, you get a fat marker (or brush in Pixelmator's case...which could also vary in size) to outline your shape. Then, if you were clumsy defining the shape, you can adjust it with the little nodes that were created around your shape. Once you're happy with the shape, the app should be able to cut away as much as possible of the background that was within the marker outline. Simple. Photoshop has something like this I believe but I'm not sure you can adjust the shape after the outline is drawn.
The gradient tool should be live...click and drag in the direction you want the gradient to face and how short or long you want the gradient to span...the as long as you don't release the mouse, the gradient should update live so that it's not a trial and error like in other programs.
Same with the paint bucket...click and drag out to reduce tolerance.
Same with zoom...click and drag in or out to zoom in and out.
If these things are a performance concern they should all be rendered roughly when previewed live and the applied with full quality on mouse release.
Of course, the old fashioned way should still exist...tolerance parameters should still be kept and a single click without a drag should honor the parameters that were set for that tool.
To be fair, I know why they're thinking within the box and not outside the box...they're trying for perfect compatibility between Photoshop and Pixelmator which explains why you can't have non-destructive effects layers. It's a shame but the compatibility design choice is probably a good one if they plan on being a PS competitor.
I wont play that game, but I'm willing to bet if you told a class kids the name of two apps, Photoshop and Pixelmator, and asked each of them, individually, everyday for a week what they were again, I'd bet you most of those kids would remember Photoshop, but have a hard time recalling Pixelmator. Sure what's in a name right? I just think it's important. I don't think it's really that important what it's called, as long as it's easy to recall.
With literally two seconds thought, if I was forced to quickly think of a new name for the app, I'd call it Pixelhouse or Pixelbrush.. anything but Pixelmator.
You remind me of (I believe) an Oscar Wilde quote
"The old believe everything; the middle aged suspect everything, and the young know everything."
"The old believe everything; the middle aged suspect everything, and the young know everything."
Is that you're thing; you join forums just to try annoy people? Walter you are a very immature person. Not to mention you're a very glass-is-half-empty type-person. Maybe you just need to get laid. Think about anyway. Me? I'm doing alright with my girlfriend.
Not thinking outside the box? That's not the point of an app like this as far as I am concerned. How about a huge price drop compared to Photoshop CS3? That is the big deal here.
There is no good reason most people need to pay $600 for Photoshop. Same for all the other Adobe apps. Innovation is not always about inventing a new way of doing things. Finding cheaper ways of doing things is just as important.
I wish PixelMator good luck and I will be waiting for the day I can kiss my Adobe apps goodbye. Not that I don't like their functionality - I just don't like their price.
If Apple were smart, they would buy this company up and integrate it into their lineup of apps. They also need to have guys like this do the same for all the other Adobe apps. Then release them all as $79 suite, with a 5 user family version for $99. Do some education and business multilicensing discounts too. It could also come free with each new Mac. It would help drive Apple's market shares sky high.
Adobe would be ticked off but who cares. Apple wins and so do we. There is no good reason Adobe apps should be so expensive.
At home, I have four Macs with CS2 and the Macromedia Suite. Upgrading them to CS3 would costs like $5,000. That is ridiculous for just a few new features. And if I upgrade now, how much will it cost next upgrade? Another $5,000? Time to look for alternatives.
Again, I am not looking for a product that creates a whole new way of doing things. I just want want the same functionality at a cheap price.
Is that you're thing; you join forums just to try annoy people? Walter you are a very immature person. Not to mention you're a very glass-is-half-empty type-person. Maybe you just need to get laid. Think about anyway. Me? I'm doing alright with my girlfriend.
????? hahaha you crack me up.
You have the self insistance of youth, that you are ALWAYS right.
Girlfriend? WTF? who brought her up? feeling threatened? just because the glass is full does not mean you should drink the liquid.
-
As for the App. its pretty good, has a real "Apple" sheen to it, infact if Steve had produced this on stage It would have gota lot of positive attention IMO. I'm highly impressed, hadn't planned on buying a retouching app (been considering elements off and on for a while though), but I'm gonna evaluate this for the 30 days and see what I think. By then Leopard should have shipped/been released and the new stuff in Preview will be better known. If I wasn't paying out for a bunch of other real life things at the moment I'd snap Pixelmator up!
How to people feel about the funny little animated tether on the filters that require defining a center point or area?
At first it just seemed bizarre (and I still think the initial animation of the thing whipping around like a rubber band is overdone), but I kind of like having a draggable object just appear without any right or option clicking. Tethering it to the filter pane, though, I dunno. Since you can only have one filter going at a time, it's not like you're going to lose track-- although since everything is a semi-transparent floating HUD window maybe they figured you might need some navigational aids.
Speaking of which, I saw an interview with the developers somewhere, and when they were asked, in effect, "what's the deal with making the document window just another floating HUD pane?" they intimated that there was some specific thing they were going for that hadn't happened yet, that involved semi-transparent HUD-ness.
How to people feel about the funny little animated tether on the filters that require defining a center point or area?
At first it just seemed bizarre (and I still think the initial animation of the thing whipping around like a rubber band is overdone), but I kind of like having a draggable object just appear without any right or option clicking. Tethering it to the filter pane, though, I dunno. Since you can only have one filter going at a time, it's not like you're going to lose track-- although since everything is a semi-transparent floating HUD window maybe they figured you might need some navigational aids.
I think its great bit of a surprise the first time, I tried to grab the "string" and move it about thinking it was a variation on a standard "knob" interface.
Agreed its a tad pointless if you only have one filter working at a time, but that if you have for example a landscape with a few different, lets say, trees and you start to use a filter, the string is a handy visual aid to where you are working and it's hardly processor intensive is it?
Quote:
Speaking of which, I saw an interview with the developers somewhere, and when they were asked, in effect, "what's the deal with making the document window just another floating HUD pane?" they intimated that there was some specific thing they were going for that hadn't happened yet, that involved semi-transparent HUD-ness.
Curiouser? to do with something coming in leopard you think? damn it, I'd just convinced myself to hold off till Jan for leopard, still thats not too far away
I think its great bit of a surprise the first time, I tried to grab the "string" and move it about thinking it was a variation on a standard "knob" interface.
Agreed its a tad pointless if you only have one filter working at a time, but that if you have for example a landscape with a few different, lets say, trees and you start to use a filter, the string is a handy visual aid to where you are working and it's hardly processor intensive is it?
Right, Core Animation is going to usher in a lot of UI innovations, I'd reckon. Some of them will be things we haven't thought of, that will seem really obvious and intuitive when we see them, and some of them will be WTF?, and some of them will be "Ahhhhhhh!!!! My eyes!!!!!!!"
I can't quite decide which the tether is. My concern is that under heavy use, the "visual clutter" of watching that little thing bounce around each and every time you open a new filter is going to get real old. I think they should tone down the initial animation, the tethering part seems like a pretty good idea.
Quote:
Curiouser? to do with something coming in leopard you think? damn it, I'd just convinced myself to hold off till Jan for leopard, still thats not too far away
OK, I found the interview, it's here. Money quote:
Quote:
Saulius: Pixelmator is an application built not only for today. We made it, thinking a lot about its future. I think that it is obvious that its palettes are the best fit for image editing.
As for the document windows, unfortunately, I can't tell you details, but believe me: It is not just because it looks good -- there is a very cool and practical feature in the works that has to do with that window transparency.
Is that you're thing; you join forums just to try annoy people? Walter you are a very immature person. Not to mention you're a very glass-is-half-empty type-person. Maybe you just need to get laid. Think about anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Walter Slocombe
????? hahaha you crack me up.
You have the self insistance of youth, that you are ALWAYS right.
Girlfriend? WTF? who brought her up? feeling threatened? just because the glass is full does not mean you should drink the liquid.
Now to both of you: please think twice before calling each other names or attributing "qualities". Especially in the course of an interesting discussion like the present one. Thanks. \
Right, Core Animation is going to usher in a lot of UI innovations, I'd reckon. Some of them will be things we haven't thought of, that will seem really obvious and intuitive when we see them, and some of them will be WTF?, and some of them will be "Ahhhhhhh!!!! My eyes!!!!!!!"
I can't quite decide which the tether is. My concern is that under heavy use, the "visual clutter" of watching that little thing bounce around each and every time you open a new filter is going to get real old. I think they should tone down the initial animation, the tethering part seems like a pretty good idea.
OK, I found the interview, it's here. Money quote:
OH THANKS! you know now you are making it REALLY hard for me NOT to buy it! damn it, its 1.30am if I open it now to "have a play" I'll not be a happy bunny in the morning
It's actually pretty easy IMO to make the choice to buy this app, it LOOKS brilliant, it FEELS great to use and its full of little inovations, of course its a numbe rof years since I've used PS in any degree of anger, but this little app ROCKS! I'm almost inclined to give them the money "just for the hell of it" even if I never used it. yeah yeah over exuberance I know, but its sitting in my dock beside Pages IMHO its a quality product.
P.s. Huge thanks to Murch for starting this thread, I'll stop gushing now
Like the app, but still hate them name. Too late now though I suppose. They should have got Sebastiaan (no, not Slewis, different one) to do the icon work and called it Acorn . Much better name and icon. Kind of like Newsfire, great app, name, bad icon - well more so the icon in that case. Disco is a prime example how important this stuff is.
The Newsfire icon should be an image of a newspaper being held open with the top 1/3 of the paper in flames.
Comments
So has anyone put it through its paces? Thoughts? I'm curious.
It still has its rough edges and bugs. But for a 1.0 release, it's fantastic. If the bugs can be ironed out fast and if the dev team starts adding wanted features, this app could become a great Photoshop alternative.
I'm a bit disappointed the dev team decided to create a custom interface for the palettes and document windows but whatever.
If the 2 brothers developing this are serious about their work, this app will really shine in a year. I followed the development a bit and I'm somewhat amazed at how fast the known bugs were fixed and how fast the features were added.
One show-stopper bug though has to be the undo support. It looks like some operations are not undoable making the undo sequence go haywire. I won't go into further details but I can say that once the bugs are squashed, this app will really shine. The team seems to be off to a good start fixing bugs rapidly and adding features.
I do really love the full screen editing mode though.
I really hope they put in live feedback on things like the gradient tool, the paint bucket, and the magic wand. The filters are rendered live thanks to CoreImage but they also need something similar to the alpha tool in iWork and Preview 4.0 (Extract by Color and Extract by Shape) where you click on a colored background of the image and drag out to decrease tolerance.
Instead of doing a trial and error tolerance slider dance, you click and drag on a color to remove that color...it's so simple it makes me cry. Same with Extract by Shape, instead of a tiny lasso, you get a fat marker (or brush in Pixelmator's case...which could also vary in size) to outline your shape. Then, if you were clumsy defining the shape, you can adjust it with the little nodes that were created around your shape. Once you're happy with the shape, the app should be able to cut away as much as possible of the background that was within the marker outline. Simple. Photoshop has something like this I believe but I'm not sure you can adjust the shape after the outline is drawn.
The gradient tool should be live...click and drag in the direction you want the gradient to face and how short or long you want the gradient to span...the as long as you don't release the mouse, the gradient should update live so that it's not a trial and error like in other programs.
Same with the paint bucket...click and drag out to reduce tolerance.
Same with zoom...click and drag in or out to zoom in and out.
If these things are a performance concern they should all be rendered roughly when previewed live and the applied with full quality on mouse release.
Of course, the old fashioned way should still exist...tolerance parameters should still be kept and a single click without a drag should honor the parameters that were set for that tool.
To be fair, I know why they're thinking within the box and not outside the box...they're trying for perfect compatibility between Photoshop and Pixelmator which explains why you can't have non-destructive effects layers. It's a shame but the compatibility design choice is probably a good one if they plan on being a PS competitor.
I wont play that game, but I'm willing to bet if you told a class kids the name of two apps, Photoshop and Pixelmator, and asked each of them, individually, everyday for a week what they were again, I'd bet you most of those kids would remember Photoshop, but have a hard time recalling Pixelmator. Sure what's in a name right? I just think it's important. I don't think it's really that important what it's called, as long as it's easy to recall.
With literally two seconds thought, if I was forced to quickly think of a new name for the app, I'd call it Pixelhouse or Pixelbrush.. anything but Pixelmator.
You remind me of (I believe) an Oscar Wilde quote
"The old believe everything; the middle aged suspect everything, and the young know everything."
Preview is ok but you can't even resize images.
Preview in Leopard is going to have many new features
You remind me of (I believe) an Oscar Wilde quote
"The old believe everything; the middle aged suspect everything, and the young know everything."
Is that you're thing; you join forums just to try annoy people? Walter you are a very immature person. Not to mention you're a very glass-is-half-empty type-person. Maybe you just need to get laid. Think about anyway. Me? I'm doing alright with my girlfriend.
There is no good reason most people need to pay $600 for Photoshop. Same for all the other Adobe apps. Innovation is not always about inventing a new way of doing things. Finding cheaper ways of doing things is just as important.
I wish PixelMator good luck and I will be waiting for the day I can kiss my Adobe apps goodbye. Not that I don't like their functionality - I just don't like their price.
If Apple were smart, they would buy this company up and integrate it into their lineup of apps. They also need to have guys like this do the same for all the other Adobe apps. Then release them all as $79 suite, with a 5 user family version for $99. Do some education and business multilicensing discounts too. It could also come free with each new Mac. It would help drive Apple's market shares sky high.
Adobe would be ticked off but who cares. Apple wins and so do we. There is no good reason Adobe apps should be so expensive.
At home, I have four Macs with CS2 and the Macromedia Suite. Upgrading them to CS3 would costs like $5,000. That is ridiculous for just a few new features. And if I upgrade now, how much will it cost next upgrade? Another $5,000? Time to look for alternatives.
Again, I am not looking for a product that creates a whole new way of doing things. I just want want the same functionality at a cheap price.
Is that you're thing; you join forums just to try annoy people? Walter you are a very immature person. Not to mention you're a very glass-is-half-empty type-person. Maybe you just need to get laid. Think about anyway. Me? I'm doing alright with my girlfriend.
????? hahaha you crack me up.
You have the self insistance of youth, that you are ALWAYS right.
Girlfriend? WTF? who brought her up? feeling threatened?
-
As for the App. its pretty good, has a real "Apple" sheen to it, infact if Steve had produced this on stage It would have gota lot of positive attention IMO. I'm highly impressed, hadn't planned on buying a retouching app (been considering elements off and on for a while though), but I'm gonna evaluate this for the 30 days and see what I think. By then Leopard should have shipped/been released and the new stuff in Preview will be better known. If I wasn't paying out for a bunch of other real life things at the moment I'd snap Pixelmator up!
At first it just seemed bizarre (and I still think the initial animation of the thing whipping around like a rubber band is overdone), but I kind of like having a draggable object just appear without any right or option clicking. Tethering it to the filter pane, though, I dunno. Since you can only have one filter going at a time, it's not like you're going to lose track-- although since everything is a semi-transparent floating HUD window maybe they figured you might need some navigational aids.
Speaking of which, I saw an interview with the developers somewhere, and when they were asked, in effect, "what's the deal with making the document window just another floating HUD pane?" they intimated that there was some specific thing they were going for that hadn't happened yet, that involved semi-transparent HUD-ness.
How to people feel about the funny little animated tether on the filters that require defining a center point or area?
At first it just seemed bizarre (and I still think the initial animation of the thing whipping around like a rubber band is overdone), but I kind of like having a draggable object just appear without any right or option clicking. Tethering it to the filter pane, though, I dunno. Since you can only have one filter going at a time, it's not like you're going to lose track-- although since everything is a semi-transparent floating HUD window maybe they figured you might need some navigational aids.
I think its great
Agreed its a tad pointless if you only have one filter working at a time, but that if you have for example a landscape with a few different, lets say, trees and you start to use a filter, the string is a handy visual aid to where you are working and it's hardly processor intensive is it?
Speaking of which, I saw an interview with the developers somewhere, and when they were asked, in effect, "what's the deal with making the document window just another floating HUD pane?" they intimated that there was some specific thing they were going for that hadn't happened yet, that involved semi-transparent HUD-ness.
Curiouser? to do with something coming in leopard you think? damn it, I'd just convinced myself to hold off till Jan for leopard, still thats not too far away
I think its great
Agreed its a tad pointless if you only have one filter working at a time, but that if you have for example a landscape with a few different, lets say, trees and you start to use a filter, the string is a handy visual aid to where you are working and it's hardly processor intensive is it?
Right, Core Animation is going to usher in a lot of UI innovations, I'd reckon. Some of them will be things we haven't thought of, that will seem really obvious and intuitive when we see them, and some of them will be WTF?, and some of them will be "Ahhhhhhh!!!! My eyes!!!!!!!"
I can't quite decide which the tether is. My concern is that under heavy use, the "visual clutter" of watching that little thing bounce around each and every time you open a new filter is going to get real old. I think they should tone down the initial animation, the tethering part seems like a pretty good idea.
Curiouser? to do with something coming in leopard you think? damn it, I'd just convinced myself to hold off till Jan for leopard, still thats not too far away
OK, I found the interview, it's here. Money quote:
Saulius: Pixelmator is an application built not only for today. We made it, thinking a lot about its future. I think that it is obvious that its palettes are the best fit for image editing.
As for the document windows, unfortunately, I can't tell you details, but believe me: It is not just because it looks good -- there is a very cool and practical feature in the works that has to do with that window transparency.
Me? I'm doing alright with my girlfriend.
Me to. But don't tell my wife.
Is that you're thing; you join forums just to try annoy people? Walter you are a very immature person. Not to mention you're a very glass-is-half-empty type-person. Maybe you just need to get laid. Think about anyway.
????? hahaha you crack me up.
You have the self insistance of youth, that you are ALWAYS right.
Girlfriend? WTF? who brought her up? feeling threatened?
Now to both of you: please think twice before calling each other names or attributing "qualities". Especially in the course of an interesting discussion like the present one. Thanks.
Right, Core Animation is going to usher in a lot of UI innovations, I'd reckon. Some of them will be things we haven't thought of, that will seem really obvious and intuitive when we see them, and some of them will be WTF?, and some of them will be "Ahhhhhhh!!!! My eyes!!!!!!!"
I can't quite decide which the tether is. My concern is that under heavy use, the "visual clutter" of watching that little thing bounce around each and every time you open a new filter is going to get real old. I think they should tone down the initial animation, the tethering part seems like a pretty good idea.
OK, I found the interview, it's here. Money quote:
OH THANKS! you know now you are making it REALLY hard for me NOT to buy it!
It's actually pretty easy IMO to make the choice to buy this app, it LOOKS brilliant, it FEELS great to use and its full of little inovations, of course its a numbe rof years since I've used PS in any degree of anger, but this little app ROCKS! I'm almost inclined to give them the money "just for the hell of it" even if I never used it. yeah yeah over exuberance I know, but its sitting in my dock beside Pages IMHO its a quality product.
P.s. Huge thanks to Murch for starting this thread, I'll stop gushing now
Like the app, but still hate them name. Too late now though I suppose. They should have got Sebastiaan (no, not Slewis, different one) to do the icon work and called it Acorn
The Newsfire icon should be an image of a newspaper being held open with the top 1/3 of the paper in flames.