Archive for June, 2007

Pixelmator is the exciting new “delicious” image editor in the works. The two developers are brothers, Saulius and Aidas Dailide, and they agreed to answer my questions about their new app, as well as what it was like to work on it.

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Well, in fact, we have been back from San Francisco for a few days now, but we have been very busy with Pixelmator. I finally found a minute to let you know what we have been up to lately.

So, let me start with the World Wide Developers Conference. Attending was great for us and our little friend Pixelmator. First of all, we met and had an opportunity to chat with many great Mac developers and stars. Secondly, we met many Apple engineers who helped us to solve some little problems with Pixelmator. We would especially like to thank Apple’s Core Image team. These guys are amazing. They helped us to solve what we thought were some hard problems with Pixelmator.

Also, we showed off Pixelmator at the Delicious Generation party. You can take a sneak peak at all the apps that were showed at this party, including Pixelmator, in this video (sorry about the quality).

We enjoyed all of the WWDC events, parties, and sessions, but the one thing that truly amazed us is the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. We already love Leopard’s desktop and the features it has. What’s more, Pixelmator runs even faster on Leopard than it did on Tiger. We learned that in some cases it can run up to two times faster – and that’s because of Core Image improvements.

So, the future looks sooo bright for Pixelmator, and there was never a better time to be a Mac developer.

Well, I’m getting back to work now.

Me and Aidas, for the first time in our lives, are going to the USA. What’s more, we are heading toward the most exciting Apple event for Mac developers–the World Wide Developers Conference.

We’ve already learned that there will be many wonderful events at WWDC, such as the Steve Jobs keynote, Apple Design Awards, Sessions & Labs for developers, and much more. One of the most important things for us is that we will have an opportunity to meet other Mac and Apple developers and ask questions. Boy, we have many questions!

Also, we will get our hands on Leopard Beta! You might want to know that Pixelmator was first an application developed exclusively for Leopard. We took advantage of plenty of wonderful Leopard technologies (which I can’t talk about much–you’ll see them once Leopard ships), but because of an Apple delay (because of the iPhone, which is going to be great), we decided to let Pixelmator run on Mac OS X Tiger too. I will explain that decision in my future articles.

So, if next week you see two strange guys who look scared to death because they are lost in San Francisco–that will be us.

It’s been four days since we announced Pixelmator. And you know what? I would never, never, oh never believe that something as insanely wonderful as last week could ever happen to our little company. It’s impossible to explain all the feelings that both of us—my brother and myself—have. We live in a fantastic dream these days. We can’t talk, we can’t sleep, we can’t even work normally. It’s so hard to wake up from Pixelmator euphoria.

I can’t tell you the exact stats, but believe me, we had an unbelievable number of visitors to our website. The traffic was so huge, there were times when our server was down (and we use one of the most reliable web service providers in the world!).

Also, I would like to thank all of you for writing us! We are receiving hundreds of e-mails from people all the around the world telling us they can’t wait for Pixelmator and how much they love what we have done. Usually we reply to messages the same day we get them, but this time, please forgive us if it takes us two or three days to answer—we are still trying to catch up!

And what can I say about your messages? I love the Mac community and its culture, I really do! It is so supportive of what we are doing, so creative with ideas, and so intelligent that I am really excited about being a little part of it.

Thank you all for your inspiring words!

I would quote all the e-mails here, but it would fill more than 20 pages of our weblog. So here are just a few of them:

“I could not wait to have your new app to play with…I will buy it right at the moment it is out.”

“Dear Aidas and Saulius,
The power that it sounds like Pixelmator will be able to have is unbelievable. I am personally a video editor and Mac application blogger, and from the video side, I know the power of GPU.”

“I’ve heard about your great Pixelmator project and what I’m reading about looks fantastic.”

“Hi! Pixelmator seems to be the “How come no one has done that yet!” app that I and many of my Mac using friends have been wanting for so long.”

“Just saw the Pixelmator video on Tuaw, and I’m stunned at the elegance and professionalism of your application.”

“Pixelmator is exactly what I’m looking for.”

“I think this is going to be huge! All i can say is wow! Amazing…beautiful UI I can’t wait to buy this! Hurry up! …no seriously hurry I’m dying to buy this!”

“This tool looks extremely exciting and (dare I say it) FUN!”