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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
> 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.
Fair enough. I don’t use the iPad version of FCP or Resolve, but I’ve paid for both Mac apps and have enjoyed free updates from Apple and Blackmagic for close to 10 years.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.)
There was also a shift in greediness, because all those prof software have pretty good hardware requirement linked to them precisely in the place where Apple extract the most money with their absurd margin.
So even if in theory a Mac could be good for video editing because of its software, for a young person, a Mac with enough storage to make this endeavor worthwhile pursuing is entirely out of his budget.
In the meantime, this person can settle for a still pretty good PC that may not be as great but will allow him to have multi-terabytes of storage at a palatable price and he can just use DaVinci or a pirated copy of Premiere.
In some ways macOS has more users but they all tend to be for the "basic" consumer type which are OK with the base configuration Apple offers that are not completely out of whack from a value standpoint.
Apple may be realizing a bit late that while it does seem alright for money making, it doesn't make for halo products that give status and are aspirational.
But then again Apple seems to be content just being a luxury brand that primarily gives status by making people appear "rich".
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.
> 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.
Sure but what Keynote does is pretty niche.
On the other hand, Pages is nowhere near the capabilities of Word and still not a good layout program either.
Numbers is OK only if your spreadsheet needs are very basic and you mostly care about the presentation of it. Its performance is so bad that even Google sheet feels better (it's way more capable nowadays, in any case).
Apple have those things only to say they have them and pretend that they have "solutions" instead of having to rely on 3rd party.
But they are not really competitive outside of the most basic need and in my opinion their existence is not worth all that much in today's landscape where both Microsoft and Google basic offering are free.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
> "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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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??
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.
"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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
> 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…
> 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.
> 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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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"?
> 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.
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 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
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
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
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.
> 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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 409 ms ] threadWhile 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.
Really looking forward to what comes out of this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It feels like the audio code was not touched since emagic days.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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/
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 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.
The Pixelmator team did the same thing with "Pixelmator Classic".
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.
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.
How does that happen? Forgetting to periodically save their work and have the app crash, or was it saving incorrectly and producing corrupted files?
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.
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.
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?
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...
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?
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.
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.
I think they are both good though.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
It’s kinda wild that macOS bundles Garage Band but doesn’t come with anything for graphics.
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?
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.
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 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'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.
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.
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.)
So even if in theory a Mac could be good for video editing because of its software, for a young person, a Mac with enough storage to make this endeavor worthwhile pursuing is entirely out of his budget. In the meantime, this person can settle for a still pretty good PC that may not be as great but will allow him to have multi-terabytes of storage at a palatable price and he can just use DaVinci or a pirated copy of Premiere.
In some ways macOS has more users but they all tend to be for the "basic" consumer type which are OK with the base configuration Apple offers that are not completely out of whack from a value standpoint.
Apple may be realizing a bit late that while it does seem alright for money making, it doesn't make for halo products that give status and are aspirational. But then again Apple seems to be content just being a luxury brand that primarily gives status by making people appear "rich".
My sample size here is small, but yeah, from my horizon FCP is starting to look abandoned.
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.
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.
I would disagree on that, at least about Keynote. I’m not the only one who loves it.
They need something to handle that... and because it's Apple they won't use PowerPoint.
Apple have those things only to say they have them and pretend that they have "solutions" instead of having to rely on 3rd party. But they are not really competitive outside of the most basic need and in my opinion their existence is not worth all that much in today's landscape where both Microsoft and Google basic offering are free.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Acorn strikes the right balance for me of simplicity vs richness of features.
Great work all around by Gus Mueller.
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.
Marketing is not the same as promotion
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-...
[1] Krita more as paint tool on my Lenovo Yoga, Gimp more as an editing tool on other computers.
As others here mentioned, Krita is also much nicer. If Pixelmator didn't exist it's probably what I'd use instead.
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).
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.
Maybe I’m in some sort of bubble.
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??
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.
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.
They have already been acquired (by Canva) earlier this year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39824191
and now Rive is really taking the 2D world by storm
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.
> 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).
I'd also emphasize that node-based compositing is more suited to VFX and layer-based compositing to motion graphics.
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.
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.
OTOH it could very well be that Apple intends to invest into Pixelmator and make it a pro app.
Time will tell.
*Actually now that I think about it, I don't seem to miss the lack of History in vector editors (and just use undo).
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.
(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.
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.
Didžiausi sveikinimai!
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41925329
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41925006
https://www.sketch.com
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.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oliviadam/dark-sky-hype...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190110174010/https://darksky.n...
On the other hand, does it help to worry? I don't think you can influence Apple.
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.
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.
Edit: and was trying to tie back to the original “Exploring is not wasted. Fretting is wasted.” comment.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Have you tried windows?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
There doesn't appear to be much overlap in terms of functionality.
Hell, if this is true I'd actively celebrate it.
When they make a focused effort in professional software, Apple can deliver.
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.
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?
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"?
Never understood the logic of getting rid of it. I know a few people who actually switched to mac because of Aperture
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.").
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?
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
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
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.
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 :)
Seems like a great way to help out budding monopolies.
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.
And since when has a company’s reputation stopped them from doing business?
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’m not a power user, neither is my wife.. I don’t think it is all that well advertised.
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.
6 months they'll realize they can't fit in with Apple's culture and most of the team will hit the road.
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.
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.
- 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.
Out of curiosity - how is this different from enabling Airplane Mode?
Weird that it seems to be different for different people, though.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-my/guide/iphone/iphb771143ee/io...
• 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.
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.
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.Looks like I missed a more normal form interface.
Those fundamentally tend to butt against the OS limitations and benefit from becoming a blessed first party utility or feature.
Shake was acquired in 2002 and killed 7 years later.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040613170323/http://www.apple....
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.
> 4.8 star / 10.5M reviews
> 500M+ Downloads
> No data shared with third parties
It gives Apple the data/insights which new artists are getting popular. Maybe they can use it to negotiate prices with artists.
Although maybe they were on their last legs before the acquisition, and it led to multitouch being everywhere, so great outcome anyway.
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.
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.
You'd be hard pressed to find any more recent success stories.
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.
https://www.biv.com/news/technology/bye-bye-android-apple-ac...
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 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.
This is typical here.
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!
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).
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 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.
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.
Development can stagnate. This isn't a huge trend with apple but it's the obvious answer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Curious if anybody has a good “combined” editor to suggest.
And such a natural fit of acquirer. This makes total sense and I'm excited to see what comes out of this!