Flight Plan for Summer

Now that the Pixelmator Team crew (that includes me, too!) is putting final touches to the release of a grand Pixelmator 1.2 Draftsman, I couldn’t keep myself from scribbling an oh-so-traditional article about what’s going on with our favorite image editor.

And, boy, is there lots of stuff to tell!

First of all, I hope it won’t be considered bad manners if I say a good word about the whole Pixelmator Team crew (that includes me again!) for working hard, as they did all last year and at the beginning of this year. Though just four months have passed this year, the team has fixed many bugs and made many improvements to Pixelmator. And the improvement goes on….

More good news for Pixelmator—we don’t have any plans for a holiday this summer. We will be working seriously on Pixelmator improvements, bug fixes, and (attention!) performance issues. 

Yup, this summer is the summer of performance for Pixelmator, which is probably why the next major update of Pixelmator is codenamed Pixelmator 1.3 Tempo.

Our task with Tempo is to stun every single user of Pixelmator by speed (think large images) of the app as much as we did with the UI and other never-before-seen things.

Tempo does not mean that we will leave other stuff behind, not at all—we will continue those huge maintenance updates we’ve been doing. And you can rest assured that every single feature and tool in Pixelmator will see major improvements with every Pixelmator release. You can get an idea of what I am talking about if you look at recently released updates where we worked on Move, Eyedropper, Selection and Navigation tools.

By the way, just for fun, I thought you might be interested to know that we use the Lighthouse application (as its developer says, and we agree, it is “beautifully simple issue tracking”) for Pixelmator issues management, and we have over 200 tickets open. Tickets include bugs, features, and improvements that you guys submit and we work on. About 30% of those are bug fixes that should be done ASAP and 50% minor improvements required for working faster and better. All the other tickets are features submitted by our users and considered by us. Of course, there would be a lot more features if we added all of them—but are you sure you want your image editor to play music from your iTunes Library?

To sum up everything I have babbled about: this summer is going to be the Summer of Pixelmator Speed and because not many bugs are left in Pixelmator, we hope to be completely bug-free by summer’s end.

For now, so that you won’t feel like you’re departing with empty hands, I leave you with the Pixelmator 1.2 Draftsman screenshot (see next post).

P.S. One of our new members in the Pixelmator Team (who was the major forums orator for a long time)— Sebastiaan van der Velden—is working on a very cool and informative Pixelmator tutorials for those of you who are completely new or even those who already know something about image editing. I hope Pixelmator Podcast will be available in a few weeks.

P.P.S. Also, you might want to know that not only is Pixelmator’s already-huge user base expanding exponentially, but also the Pixelmator Team is growing too! There are 6 people working here for you! I think everyone will feel the benefits of the bigger team soon.

Wednesday, 30 April 2008. Posted by Saulius.

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