Archive for the ‘Pixelmator Team’ Category

Pixelmator Development Update

I know you love these Pixelmator development updates. I wish I could do these more often and reveal everything that the Pixelmator Team is up to, but since we love to surprise and delight you, I hope you’ll forgive me for not being too open about things.

Anyway, let me give you at least a tiny sneak peak at what we are up to these days.

First of all, I must tell you that I am so freaking happy about the Pixelmator 1.6 Nucleus that has been out for a few months now. I really wish every single Pixelmator update was like that—high-quality, very successful in terms of sales, and very much enjoyed by customers. It’s simply awesome! If you don’t have it yet, you should get it.

Secondly, it is not a secret that the Pixelmator Team is always doing an enormous amount of work (yep, we always do). Currently (for almost two years now), we are working on significant improvements to the existing fundamental features of Pixelmator (in other words, we are improving quality):

  • Selection tools are about to see the biggest update since version 1.0. We did a complete modernization of all of the selection tools. The Rectangular Marquee, Elliptical Marquee, Lasso, Polygonal Lasso, and the magical (since it is a click-and-drag tool) Magic Wand are to become not only much faster, but also much more precise. Selection tools are currently in test mode, and I must say, I enjoy them very much.
  • Another tool which is receiving a huge quality and performance improvement is the Gradient tool. In addition to that damn banding issue being gone and increased performance, new Gradients look extremely smooth and high-quality. I greatly enjoy this type of development achievements. We also built some new Gradient types (reflected and diamond), but aren’t going to officially release those yet (or ever?).
  • The Crop tool is also getting some very nice improvements in terms of performance and usability.
  • There is definitely some more very cool stuff that is also in the works that, as usually, I can’t talk about just yet.

The reign of these amazing updates is coming soon (before the end of this year). I hope you get the idea of where Pixelmator is heading. You will sleep better knowing that every single part of the app is being modernized and polished and some very cool new features are on the way. I can’t wait to show those to you. We are working extremely hard to bring you the best image editing app in the world. We are almost done with those basic features…

P.S. Oh, and we are also very much aware that our Type tool sucks. Just stay tuned.

Wednesday, 1 December 2010. Posted by Saulius.

64 Comments

Our Web Store

The Mac App Store is on its way, and once it is out we hope we won’t need to worry about the selling and distribution of Pixelmator to Mac users anymore. However, we still care about our own web store (we think we will keep it for special buyers such as educational institutions, businesses, etc.).

The recent news about our Web store is that we have just moved from an eSellerate- to a FastSpring-based Web store. Even though eSellerate served us extremely well in the past, we are very excited to transition to FastSpring due to FastSpring’s more modern look and feel, and its being more Mac friendly. Here is the difference so far:

Thanks to FastSpring’s taking great care of us, we have a much easier-to-use Web store—a store that should have been in place years ago. What’s more, we are still working with them to make it even simpler.

So if you are a third-party Mac developer, FastSpring is highly recommended as an addition to the forthcoming Mac App Store or as a main web store for those of you not bringing your apps to the Mac App Store (are you crazy?).

By the way, The Beatles are now on iTunes and iOS 4.2 is out!

Tuesday, 23 November 2010. Posted by Saulius.

9 Comments

Some More Interior Stuff

We love our office very much—truly a very creative place to work. But it looks like it’s not only we who appreciate the Pixelmator Team office. Latest to enjoy the office is our good friend Fabio Sasso at the Abduzeedo.

Thursday, 18 November 2010. Posted by Saulius.

10 Comments

Interview, iOffice, and More

I just love giving interviews—especially when they ask interesting questions. I recently had an honest interview by the Mac.AppStorm crew. I talked about the Pixelmator Team, the things we do, what we use, and stuff like that. I also revealed the code name of the next major update of Pixelmator, and Mac.AppStorm took a sneak peek at our iOffice.

The article with the interview is available at Mac.AppStorm. Enjoy!

Tuesday, 9 November 2010. Posted by Saulius.

5 Comments

Little Things

In a geek world, little things matter. For us—we are Mac geeks, right?!—things matter especially if they come from (or at least are somehow related to) Apple.

Little things that were delivered to the Pixelmator Team Factory this week:

Love all that cheerful stuff.

Wednesday, 3 November 2010. Posted by Saulius.

11 Comments

Pixelmator in Steve Jobs Keynote

I am sure you watched Steve Jobs’s “Back to the Mac” keynote yesterday. It was very nice, wasn’t it? Each of them—iLife ’11, FaceTime, the Mac App Store, Mac OS X Lion (where is the version number, anyone?), and MacBook Air—are all just so awesome.

However, there was one tiny detail that directly relates to us. I am not sure if you noticed, but Pixelmator was one of the few apps that made it into the Steve Jobs keynote! Yay!



Actually it was visible multiple times in the keynote: a few times in the Mac OS X Lion screenshots when Steve spoke about the Launchpad as well as in the Craig Federighi (the guy who presented the demo of the Mac OS X Lion features) slides.

Having the Pixelmator icon in Steve Jobs’s keynote is something we dreamed of for years (see how fragile we are?). And once it finally made it there, it feels so great … so inspiring; it’s definitely a huge bonus reward for our hard work.

Also, kudos to the developers of Coda, Delicious Library, Tweetie, OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, NetNewsWire, and, of course, Courier for also making it into the keynote. Everyone aforementioned is so worth it.

Thursday, 21 October 2010. Posted by Saulius.

27 Comments

Pixelmator on Canvas

One day a UPS delivery agent arrived at our office with a huge package that nobody at the office had ordered. The package included a tiny leaflet and a gorgeous Pixelmator 1.0 screenshot printed on canvas. It appeared to be a gift from the Netherlands-based company HelloCanvas.

We liked the picture so much that we decided to order a full collection of Pixelmator screenshots (Firestarter, Kitten, Draftsman, Tempo, Sprinkle, Spider, and Nucleus) for our office. It became a tradition to order the screenshot on canvas with each major Pixelmator update.

These screenshots look wonderful. I hope you can get an idea just how nice the prints are from these photos:

I am definitely ordering some for my house, and if you want one, you can download our high-resolution Pixelmator screenshots from our website and then have them printed on canvas at HelloCanvas. I assure you that the quality is excellent.

Wednesday, 13 October 2010. Posted by Saulius.

5 Comments

Happy Birthday, Pixelmator!

Three years ago today (September 25th, 2007) the glorious but, of course, a bit buggy Pixelmator 1.0 was released. Can you believe that it’s been three (3!, drei!, tres!, trois!, tre!) years? I can’t. It feels like a lot less.

The release of Pixelmator 1.0 was one of the most exciting application launches in the history of third-party Mac software. Even after three years, I can state that without a doubt Pixelmator is an absolute success. It exceeded our wildest expectations back then (the app made $60,000 the first day!) and is doing even better now (much better!). Imagine what will happen when we ship that bitchin’ 2.0 we’ve been preparing!

Anyway, to celebrate Pixelmator’s third birthday, we decided to not only post this article, sing songs, dance, eat a bunch of cake, and have some fun talks about ours truly, but also to do a little something for those of you who haven’t yet joined the list of happy Pixelmator users: give you a birthday coupon code! Yay!

Use the “HAPPYBIRTHDAY” code at our web store to purchase Pixelmator at a huge 30% discount. Hurry up, since the coupon code will work for only three days.

Enjoy!

P.S. Good to know that Pixelmator is not getting older but is getting better, and its best years are still ahead.

Saturday, 25 September 2010. Posted by Saulius.

19 Comments

A Little Goodie

The other day I was testing Pixelmator 1.6 Nucleus by playing with the famous Bokeh tutorial (brought to Pixelmator users by the famous graphics designer Fabio Sasso), and I created a desktop picture for my Mac, iPhone, and new iPad (yay, I do have that one and highly recommend it to everyone!). And boy, this Bokeh desktop picture came out so amazing on all three – Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Even though you can do one yourself easily in Pixelmator, I could not resist doing a good thing and sharing it with you, so download it now (package includes Bokeh backgrounds for your Mac, iPad, and iPhone).

Also, you can sort of personalize it quickly by opening the downloaded images in Pixelmator and, for example, changing the color hue and/or saturation (Choose Image > Hue and Saturation).

Enjoy!

Update: The package now also includes standard-size (1024 x 1024) version of Bokeh picture for your iPad (Thanks to Dave M. for letting me know about it – I am not that experienced iPader yet :) )

Monday, 17 May 2010. Posted by Saulius.

19 Comments

TUAW Interview: The Pixelmator Team

As we mentioned last week, one of the most anticipated OS X applications in a long while finally hit the street when Pixelmator shipped version 1.0. We were fortunate enough to get the two brothers behind the application, Saulius and Aidas Dailide, to contribute our latest TUAW Interview. In terms of their relative contribution to Pixelmator, Saulius is more focused on the UI, while Aidas provides most the heavy lifting on the back end. In this interview they discuss some of the thinking behind Pixelmator, where it came from, and what they are trying to accomplish.

Mat Lu, TUAW

Read more…

Thursday, 4 October 2007. Posted by Saulius.

14 Comments