Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

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.

I must tell you that 2007 was the best year for us so far. We created Pixelmator, which is one of the best applications that was created last year. In addition, we met a lot of amazing people. We rented a new office and most importantly, we had so much fun doing the stuff that we like to do. Oh, because we made a lot of money in 2007, we can continue having fun working with Pixelmator in 2008.

But what’s next? What’s going to happen in 2008? I believe this will be an even better year for Pixelmator — the app will reach teenager status. No doubt it will become even more popular, more stable, and much faster as we add many new and incredible things to it.

In fact, we started improving Pixelmator the same day we shipped version 1.1.1 (December 18th). Version 1.1.2 will be out in a few days (or tomorrow), and I know you’ll love it. Recently, we have been focusing on selection tools and stability, as well as a few minor performance improvements.

We still have planned a couple more minor updates for Kitten era, but are already working on some major Draftsman (version 1.2 of Pixelmator) improvements and features. I can’t wait to show you the Draftsman stuff that is in the works.

Also, there are many more major updates planned for 2008. If you were to ask me whether there will be a 2.0 this year, my answer would be, “I am not sure.” But, I must say that we plan to start working on version 2.0 once we are sure this version is perfect in terms of stability, performance, and usability.

We just finished putting the final touches on Pixelmator 1.1 Kitten. It has some pretty neat features and a bunch of bug fixes. Well, this is the bright side. The dark side of the current situation is that, unfortunately, because of Core Image memory leak, we can’t release it yet.

Some Pixelmator users have encountered a not so tiny memory leak that dramatically slows down the application, but this is not the worst thing. The really bad thing is what we found after we spent a lot of time trying to find and fix it. At first we thought this was a Pixelmator problem, but sadly this problem is not in Pixelmator; it is hiding deep in Core Image itself and probably affects not only Pixelmator, but also other apps that take advantage of Core Image. Currently there is no workaround available for this leak, and I believe this thing has to be fixed before I can give Kitten to you.

Anyway, the good news is that we are working closely with Apple (yup, mothership takes good care of its developers) to fix this bug in Core Image as soon as possible. I just hope Apple won’t take forever to take care of it—keep your fingers crossed.

I am so sorry if I am late with this article. I know you’ve missed us a lot and we missed you too. Anyway, let me explain what is going on here.

First of all, Pixelmator is doing amazingly well. We are growing very fast in all respects, and this not only brings us happiness, excitement and motivation, it also brings more problems that we have to solve.

October was a very interesting, but difficult month for us. We’ve been traveling around the world for a few weeks now and have been working out of hotels and fast food restaurants. This is not a vacation, however. Not even close! We had about 20 meetings with some huge companies, distributors and others that want Pixelmator to become even more popular. I would love to tell you more details about what we are up to, but I think it would be better if you see the results for yourself.

The big problem for us is that we’ve tried to do everything by ourselves: fix bugs in Pixelmator, meet with people who want to help us, and keep our support alive. It seems to me that we haven’t been very successful at some of these things, as Pixelmator development and support was not good enough in October.

In any case, there is no reason to be sad. Everything is going to be better starting tomorrow. We are finally releasing the Leopard-friendly version of Pixelmator. It is not that major update (1.1 Kitten); it is just a pack of bug fixes (it’s 1.0.2) and small improvements that have mostly to do with Leopard.

The real-Leopard version of Pixelmator will be available later this month, and we are on track to ship it on time. I am sure you’ll love it.

Other news from the Pixelmator Team is that we are looking for a friendly person to help us handle all the Pixelmator support details. We have some ideas to dramatically improve Pixelmator’s help and support engine. I am doing my best to make sure that no one is left without help.

We have also moved to our new office, which is very cool. I promise to add some photos to Flickr as soon as I am done with the release.

For now, if you would like to get a detailed update of Pixelmator’s development, Aidas has set-up a Twitter account. To check out Pixelmator’s current status, just click here.

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…

Whew, today is the day. Finally, we started sending our first closed beta seed to testers. I don’t have much time for beta description, but I wanted to make a few notes.

First of all, thank you very much for being so active with your emails about participating in Pixelmator Beta. It’s really great to know that so many people care about Pixelmator. That’s one more reason why it has to be great.

As I mentioned in the Pixelmator Beta Guidelines document (which comes with the application), the main purpose of Pixelmator Beta is to ensure the highest quality possible for the final version of the application. And by using beta and letting us know about any problems you are experiencing, you will help us to significantly improve the application before it is released.

And, I promise a little “thank you” gift for all of the beta testers once we are ready with Pixelmator.

However, one thing that I really would like to ask all of the people who are participating in beta is to please, please, please do not post any info or share the application yet. It’s not finished and any bad things that go public would hurt us. First you’d better give us a chance to fix them. We plan to have three seeds of the beta before the final release.

So, thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy the first beta of Pixelmator! (Be sure to try the filter rope. ;))

P.S. This weekend will be the first weekend we are to have some rest. Whoohooo! Well, half-rest. We could not stop thinking about and checking the status of Pixelmator bugs.

As you may have already noticed, we’ve been quiet for some time. And yup, you are right, we’re working like crazy these days. The last time we had a free weekend was two months ago and we are still very passionate about our work. I see from your emails that you can’t wait to get your hands on Pixelmator and keep asking us how the birth of our little app is going, when will the beta be released, how will some features work, and so on.

So, I guess, it’s time for a good Pixelmator development update.

First of all, I have to tell you that we are very happy with what we have done so far. Pixelmator looks great, it works great, and it really is so much fun. Although it is not yet finished, it’s not too far from being ready.

If you investigated the Pixelmator Tech Specs website, you would notice that we had some strange blending modes like Minus, Modulate, Bumpmap, and Subtract. Although they looked nice, we removed them and added those that are available in Big Brother (Photoshop). The reason for this is to ensure better compatibility with PSD files. So now, our blending mode list includes: Normal, Dissolve, Darken, Multiply, Color Burn, Linear Burn, Darker Color, Lighten, Screen, Color Dodge, Linear Dodge, Lighter Color, Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix, Difference, Exclusion, Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity. We compared them to Big Brother and they look exactly the same in Pixelmator. That’s good.

Other changes In Pixelmator Tech specs are about .Mac support. .Mac support is temporary removed. It’s not that we had any problems developing it—it’s just that when we done with it, we were not very happy with just being able to backup Pixelmator swatches and brushes. It’s almost useless. Another reason for this is that we would like to concentrate on the most important features in Pixelmator. Anyway, .Mac support will be back in Pixelmator version 1.1 or 1.2.

Pixelmator supports over 100 different file formats; 112, exactly. However, the most important ones are PSD, Tiff, PNG, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, BMP and PXM. PXM is the native Pixelmator file format. It is the best way to store your compositions without losing layers or any other info about your file. We would love to use PSD as our main file format, but it is too closed and we don’t have as many features in Pixelmator as Big Brother stores in PSD files.

Speaking of other file formats, probably few of them (five I guess) will be removed from the list, because of some problems in ImageMagick (Pixelmator foundation). We don’t want to have any stuff in Pixelmator that is not stable. But once those formats are fixed—they will be back. We’ve prepared a little overview of Pixelmator-supported file formats. You will be able to download the PDF soon.
That’s pretty much it about the changes in the Pixelmator technical specifications. Note, however, that there are some amazing news about gradients (I will tell you in our next article) and some more new, little improvements in some corners of the app that are not mentioned in Tech Specs page.

The biggest part of Pixelmator is already done, but there are still some features that have to be finished. These days, Aidas is working on Layer masks (we should be completely done with Layers this week). Other things that are not yet complete in Pixelmator are transformations (Scale, Rotate, Skew, Distort, Perspective, etc.), Sharpen/Blur tools, the Clone Stamp tool, and Undo/Redo. Undo/Redo is the hard one. It will take 4–5 days to finish that feature. Also, we would like to improve the painting engine a bit; there is something that is not yet right.

So, our plan is: 1. Finish all the Pixelmator features. 2. Test and fix some bugs internally. 3. Release closed beta (Closed?! OMG How could we dare to do that!).

Yes, we decided not to release a public beta. Let me explain why. As you may know, we are just two guys in the Pixelmator Team (well, sometimes three), and we get many emails every day. That’s great, and we love answering emails, but we also have to spend some time creating Pixelmator. So, if we release a public beta, we think our mailboxes would be more than full; we would get a lot of feedback, feature requests, even blames. While Pixelmator is not finished and has bugs, we would like to concentrate just on improving the application. That we would do better, faster, and without chaos with a small group of people (about 2000 plus MacHeist promo purchasers). And once it is released, you would have a stable and as good an app as it should be.

I know you need some dates, and I know we promised release at the end of July. Although we will do everything we can to have a feature complete and bug-free version of Pixelmator the last second of this month, I don’t think that we will release it yet. So, the Pixelmator closed beta release date is scheduled to be the 16th of August.

Drop me an email at bugs at pixelmator.com if you would like to participate. Be sure to tell me your Mac specifications and your skills. Please note that having a lot of experience working with many design apps does not mean that you have more chances to be in beta than if you don’t know anything about graphic design or computers. We would love to see iLife fans, switchers from Windows, grandfathers and grandmothers, 6-year-old kids, and our secret friend John Gruber trying out Pixelmator beta.

I hope this helps you to understand where are we. Feel free to blame us, motivate us, or discuss anything I mentioned in this article.

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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