Archive for September, 2007

Now that Pixelmator is on almost every Mac on the planet (if you don’t have it yet, go and get it), I am sure we need some gasoline to start using it.

I am very happy to announce that thanks to the Solid Publishing crew, the first Pixelmator manual is ready and waiting for you to download. Even more, you can get a printed version of manual for just $23.60.

Also, our buddy Don McAllister from ScreenCastsOnline has prepared a wonderful introductory Pixelmator screencast for you. Click here to view it.

We are working with our partners to bring even more learning resources for Pixelmator. If you have created any screencasts, tips and tricks, tutorials, or anything else that looks fun and useful, let us know and we’ll make sure everyone knows.

Pixelmator Team today released Pixelmator 1.0, GPU-powered image editing tool that provides everything needed to create, edit, and enhance still images.

“After two months of bug squashing we are very excited to finally release Pixelmator,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. “With its use of latest Mac OS X technologies, breakthrough ease-of-use, innovation and low $59 price tag we think all Mac users will find Pixelmator very useful and fun.”

Built from the ground up on a combination of open source and Mac OS X technologies, Pixelmator features powerful selection, painting, retouching, navigation, and color correction tools, and layers-based image editing, GPU-powered image processing, color management, automation, and transparent HUD user interface for work with images.

Mac iSight users will enjoy Pixelmator’s New Layer from iSight feature that allows taking a snapshot with Mac’s built-in video camera and adding the snapshot as a layer in composition. The Photo Browser palette in Pixelmator offers quick access to iPhoto Library, events, albums, Smart Albums, and pictures in the user’s Pictures folder. Best of all, the user can just drag-and-drop any of those images as layers in Pixelmator composition.

Pixelmator is based on Core Image and OpenGL technologies that use Mac’s video card for image processing. Core Image and OpenGL utilize the graphics card for image processing operations, freeing the CPU for other tasks. And if a high-performance card with increased video memory (VRAM) is present, the user will find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of Pixelmator operations, including editing tools, color correction tools, and filters. Pixelmator is lightning-fast on the latest PowerPC and all Intel-based Macs.

Other notable features: Pixelmator supports more than 100 different file formats, including Photoshop images with layers, and it comes with more than 15 color correction tools and 50 Core Image-powered filters, transform tools, fill and stroke, Gradients, QuickMask mode, full-screen editing mode, Automator support, ColorSync support, Spotlight support, and much more.

Pricing & Availability
Pixelmator 1.0 is available to order for $59 (US) at www.pixelmator.com/buy.
The Pixelmator demo version is available as a free download at www.pixelmator.com/download/

From the start of Pixelmator, I’ve been and still am receiving many questions about what the roadmap of Pixelmator is going to be like. What features are we going to add? Where are we heading with it, and what is our plan? Altough I can’t get into specifics, and micro features, I’ll try to answer these questions now.

If you think of Pixelmator and look at what we already have done, I think you would understand that one of our main strengths is the extraordinary support of Mac OS X. We would never be able to create something like Pixelmator in such a short time on other operating systems. Also, we would not have such exciting features as Core Image, Automator, iSight, ColorSync, Photo Browser, and many others without Mac OS X. So believe me, we totally understand that our biggest strength here is taking advantage of Mac OS X features and technologies. We will continue to do so and it is the first and most important part of the Pixelmator flight plan.

The second task with Pixelmator development is the improvement of all the tools that are already available. You can expect surprises with tools we have planned for Pixelmator. Of course, we could add many improvements now, but then we would not be able to ship Pixelmator anytime this decade. Anyhow, you will see important improvements/features to Pixelmator tools soon after the release. I am not talking about new features here; I am talking about the evolution of existing things – and there still is some work that needs to be done.

The third thing with Pixelmator that we are concentrating on is the foundation. The Pixelmator foundation is very important when you want to have the best application for image editing. For that, we have some incredible technology, which I hope you will see a few months from now. Aidas did a few experiments with it and told me that to implement that “top secret” thing, we would need a month or two. Sorry about the secrecy, but I promise - you’ll love it.

The last but not least task with Pixelmator is to carefully add new features. We know what features you guys need and we know what features we will add, but we promised ourselves to do so very wisely because we want to make those features stable and useful; we don’t need to just sound good - we need to make it good. Therefore, if you look at Pixelmator and what I’ve already told you, you may be able to guess some of those cool things we are going to add.

Additionally, regarding the new features or improvements, please take some time to drop us a message about what you really would like to see in Pixelmator because we listen, and we listen very carefully. Aidas and I read every e-mail and keep a development list in our heads. Your voice is very important to the future of Pixelmator.

To sum up everything I’ve mentioned here: We are just beginning! And our beginning is good enough to create the best image editor for Mac OS X that anyone can use.

Just shipped our latest and greatest Pixelmator 1.0 Beta 2 to our beta group—and feedback has been just great. I guess there is a good reason for that:

Our beta testers are catching bugs like crazy. Many people have sent us perfectly detailed reports, and we thank you for that! So, because of you guys, we were able to fix more than 100 bugs and add more than 50 different improvements to Pixelmator. It now looks like we have a really stable, fast, and, of course, fun version of the coolest image editor for Mac. We are really excited about it!

For those of you who didn’t make it into the beta test group: thank for trying to get in, but please note that our beta program was more than a couple of weeks ago and we are not taking any more submissions. Well, don’t be sad about that, because Pixelmator will be shipping very soon…