It's disappointing to see they still have no support for layer styles, which is critical to the workflow of most designers, despite the fact that the most popular threads on their forums are full of people requesting just that.<p>Myself and plenty of other people would love to get away from Photoshop, but without this feature, it's simply not an option.
But, the ones bitching and moaning about Photoshop is the web designers, not the photographers. Too bad Pixelmator tries to do both, like Photoshop, and focus more on Photography than pixel design.<p>I've tried to switch from Photoshop to Pixelmator, Acorn, Draw It, Gimp and Incscape - but no dice. Photoshop still has the best features for pixel design.
Does anyone have enough experience to comment on how Pixelmator compares to Acorn? I use Acorn for the occasional times when I need an image editor and have no issues with it, just curious how the two compare. A quick google search only turned up comparisons from several years ago, and I know Acorn has had a lot of changes/improvements since then, and I'm sure the same is true for Pixelmator.
Last time I used Pixelmator when I selected a rectangle I couldn't see the coordinate/dimensions (w/o using the rulers). Is this still true?It's such a simple addition but at the time they refused to add it.
I think the Pixelmator guys have already won: they've made a native-feeling app that doesn't feel like an OS booting to launch. It's the TextMate to Adobe's Eclipse.
It looks like it has become a hybrid pixel / vector graphics editor...note the screenshot at the bottom right and the control points highlighted on the butterfly.
This is HN we talk about business issues sometimes here. Permit me to make some comments.<p>I've had Pixelmator since it came out. I use it, Acorn, and Photoshop Elements. I would really like to get off the Adobe bandwagon since Elements has insidiously overbearing DRM where you get two installs and you lose an install permanently every time your hard drive goes down, so that you weren't able to delicense first. So I had Elements installed on my laptop and my desktop and when the laptop's drive kicked the bucket, then I was down to one activation and could no longer use it on the laptop without buying it again. This is annoying and it is not how my hammer works. My hammer works whether or not my hard drive has gone down. It's also not how a lot of other software works. But it is how some works.<p>So Pixelmator has the Apple Store thing. One install only, so none of this nonsense of installing on laptop and desktop even though both are used by the same single person who never uses both at once. However, if the harddrive goes down, there is some way to get the license back, delicensing is not necessary first.<p>But in any case I don't want to buy Apple Store stuff because I don't want my machine ID tied to my credit card number with Apple. Apple is doing too much privacy invading and I want nothing to do with it. If others want that fine.<p>So Pixelmator 2 will be Apple store only, and no upgrade price for loyal Pixelmator 1 users.<p>So that's it. Not upgrading and not recommending it to anyone.<p>That leaves Acorn and Gimp.<p>Photoshop is hands down a better program than anything else, but the last few years it seems most of their time has been spent on DRM. Photoshop is constantly trying to connect to the internet, which it has absolutely no legitimate reason that benefits the customer to be doing. Programs that connect to the internet that have no reason to are intrinsically suspicious.<p>I can see more of the value proposition for open source because of all this DRM stuff.<p>I pay for all my software. I am the good customer. But over the top DRM is driving me to alternatives, forcing me to have to use open source solutions instead even if I'd rather have something that's a little more polished like a commercial product.<p>Oh well. I am fine using the alternatives. It's interesting to me though that companies would do this. Such as take an app, pull it from distribution unless you lock your hardware to a credit card at an Apple store. Why would I want to do that just to use a image editing app?<p>Sure for many people this is no big deal. They don't care about privacy or fair use of things they have bought. But some of us do.
I would have thought that adobe would have either invented or bought patents relating to context aware fill in order to prevent other graphics software from implementing it. I am very pleased to see it in Pixelmator.
I've bought Pixelmator, but every time I try to use it I find that it's just significantly different enough from Photoshop that I lose all my speed and efficiency, and just feel like I'm wasting time. I would really have preferred if it was just a straight subset of Photoshop's features, with the same key commands and paradigms, but more lightweight.
I'm looking forward to this release. While Pixelmator is still lacking in a few crucial areas, as well as having a few odd quirks, I've been thoroughly pleased with it since day one, and, as an avid photographer and web developer, I manage to do everything I need with it. It has in its ~80mb glory, together with Apple's Aperture, entirely replaced my need for the ~12gb horrendous bloat Photoshop offers.