May 31, 2007

TUAW Exclusive: Video of Pixelmator in action

While Pixelmator may technically be vaporware according to Gruber, I managed to snag an exclusive demonstration video of the app in action from its developers, brothers Aidas and Saulius Dailide (who you might be interested to know also founded Jumsoft). The demo showcases some impressive Pixelmator features, including working with multiple layers and objects, opening Photoshop files and moving layers from one image to another, taking a picture with an iSight camera and embedding it into the current working image, and even some impressive blending modes.

David Chartier, TUAW

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Comments

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  • Dylan

    This looks absolutely fantastic. It makes Gruber look like even more of a jackass for doubting you guys.

    17 years ago
  • Patrick Haney

    I stumbled upon Pixelmator today and am extremely interested in seeing how well it competes with Photoshop. I’ve put off buying CS3 due to the cost, even though I find the Macromedia Suite (2004) to crawl along on my MacBook Pro. Between this and Lineform, I may not need to pick up Fireworks/Illustrator and Photoshop after all.

    Looking forward to a trial demo release that I can actually play around with.

    17 years ago
  • Jonas Westerlund

    Can’t wait to try it out, looks very, very promising. Fantastic work, guys. 🙂

    17 years ago
  • Anonymous Swine

    Dylan,

    Gruber isn’t doubting anyone. Calling it vaporware is merely labeling this as what it currently is. Until it’s released, it’s vaporware. It’s a simple fact.

    17 years ago
  • Richard Lane

    I’ll buy it right off the bat just to check it our and encourage your development. If its half as powerful as Photoshop it should be a hit. I’d love to be a Beta tester.

    17 years ago
  • Josh Farkas | RefreshingContent.com

    I am also looking forward to this release something fierce.

    I personally would love to see the focus put on Pixelmator benefits over Photoshop. I understand the Core engine support, but a simple breakdown would help convince me to part with $60 versus something I already own.

    By the way, the site is sexy as hell. Well done.

    17 years ago
  • Nic Wise

    Fantastic. Just what I’ve been looking for – CS3 is too heavy and expensive, iphoto way too light.

    Best of luck to you with this. I’ll be in line to buy it when it comes out. 🙂

    17 years ago
  • Jim

    Dylan, Gruber called it exactly as it’s defined – software that’s being promoted, but has not yet been published. That’s vaporware.

    Moreover, I don’t think Pixelmator could have gotten much better free publicity than Gruber’s mention.

    17 years ago
  • Podkost

    What Grube misses is that the internet public definition of vapourware has this sarcastic undertone of “software that doesn’t ship and won’t ship, resp. was never meant to ship”. A non-product. Vapourware has this very negative undertone and that’s what upsets people.

    Yes the strict dictionary definition might not reflect this, maybe, because the meaning and tone of the word have changed in this short-lived time and age, but from all reactions it should be clear that Gruber seems to be using the word in a strict dictionary sense, while everyone else interpretes it differently with a very negative undertone.

    17 years ago
  • Grant McCall

    I really want to see the full screen mode, the major thing that annoys me about OSX and a lot of programs is that every window or pallett just floats, and you can see every other programs windows underneath the one your working with, things get very messy quickly. Hopefully the fullscreen mode addresses this, which Im sure it will.

    17 years ago
  • Raz

    The GUI looks just great! And looks like it’s going to be a great tool to work with. Also, will you guys make it available for Windows someday? Looking forward for more news.

    17 years ago
  • Anonymous Swine

    Raz, get a Mac. These guys aren’t going to waste their time porting to Windoze.

    17 years ago
  • Easyldur

    Oh please, oh please, add some support to vectorial graphic objects! That’s what I miss the most from what I used to have on Win back in the days: Paint Shop Pro.

    This seems to be a very nice piece of software anyway, I think I can get it and drop Chocoflop and Seashore (those are nice, but miss too many features). Plus, I love that CoreImage-based thing!

    17 years ago
  • Xander

    Wow!

    It’s possible, in future, have Pixelmator also for other Unix-based o.s. (like Linux, BSD, etc..)?

    The dipendence by CoreImage could be a problem?

    Good Work.

    17 years ago
  • Yong Hwee

    Awesome! I’m in love with how it looks and how powerful it is. If priced at $59, it’ll sell like hotcakes!

    17 years ago
  • Aidas

    We’ve been using Macs for… I don’t know, maybe 13 years now and we absolutely love them. Pixelmator is NEVER going to be released for platforms other than Mac OS X! Never!

    17 years ago
  • Anthony

    I have been looking for something other than Photoshop. I am so tired of giving money to Adobe with each bloated release. I am *very* excited about your upcoming app. I have sent your site link to 37 of my graphic design buddies and architects. I am impatiently waiting for the release. 🙂 You rock, pure and simple.

    17 years ago
  • Xander

    @ Aidas: thanks a lot.

    What a idiot answer.

    This is your sight of OpenSource?!

    What about Cairo & ImageMagick?!

    17 years ago
  • Kyle Rove

    @Xander

    Do you not understand that reliance on Core Image (a proprietary Mac OS X technology) makes it _impossible_ to port Pixelmator to other platforms? Core Image does all the heavy lifting, graphics-specific stuff that has made Pixelmator even possible. Without it, you wouldn’t get very far on other platforms.

    17 years ago
  • Kyle Rove

    The only people that give “vaporware” a bad name are the countless companies whose marketing departments go overboard and over-promise stuff that doesn’t even exist.

    Pixelmator, I believe, will transcend that boundary of vaporware and real, shipping product very soon, pleasing many, including myself. Oh, how long I have waited for a Mac OS X-like Photoshop alternative.

    17 years ago
  • Xander

    @ Kyle Rove:

    Aidas could be use another way to tell: “No, nothing porting for technical limits”.

    But.. Wow, what a MKTG man!!!

    Bye.

    17 years ago
  • Aidas

    Sorry, Xander, I believe you didn’t understand what I meant. What I meant to say is that we develop for Macs only because we believe it’s the best platform in the world and it is a big part of our lifes.

    Pixelmator indeed heavily depends on Mac OS X technologies and porting it would require hundreds of thousands (if not millions) hours.

    17 years ago
  • CJ

    I just found Pixelmator yesterday through TUAW and it looks amazing! I cannot wait for its release! As somebody who does not have near enough money to afford Photoshop, this is great news. Good luck guys!

    17 years ago
  • alex kent

    you guys say you’re using ImageMagick as ‘the base for pixelmator’. but having spent a bunch of time writing web tools which use IM for generating dynamic content and the like, i don’t quite understand what you mean. can you elaborate a bit ? where does IM fit into the framework puzzle.
    also how do you plan to deal with open source licensing issues ? as i understand it, IM is under GPL, so derivative works must also be GPL, and thus, no $

    screenshots and video look great though.

    17 years ago
  • Tim

    This looks really great. I can’t bring myself to shell out the $$ for Photoshop, but this looks feasible.
    Any chance this will support RAW format? That’s the main reason I want Photoshop (or prolly Lightroom).

    17 years ago
  • oomu

    imagemagick is not GPL licensed. it allows modification and redistribution in a closed commercial product.

    they have to tell they used imagemagick sourcecode and acknowledge who did the work they use. they did that already in the website, they surely do that in the About dialog box of the finale product.

    beside imagemack , they seem to extensively use os x 10.4 technology : core image, automaverttor, colorsync and so on
    these things does not exist on linux or are vastly different. they cannot “port” the application. (beside, the cocoa part is now too much different from “gnustep” to be trivial to adapt)

    one day Cairo will be a opensource “core image” for X gpu rendered work, but it is not that for the moment. it will need years of works before that.
    Anyway, Cairo is a not a copycat of CI and Quartz.
    (cairo is a graphical/vectoriel foundation for X / Gnome desktop on opensource software. it can also work on os x, complementing quartz in some ways)

    so. they made a choice : to develop and use all the marvels of 10.4 (a clever way to sell a sexy new application for an existing market : enthusiastic os X users) , it is not trivial to do a “linux version”. they would need to work on many layers of opensources foundations to bring them to what apple did with core image and quartz.

    Automator has no match in gnome or kde , for example.
    Colorsync has support of all screen/printers/whatever hardware industrials, not X11 (a shame, because X11 can use color profiles, but who did the legal work to authorize their use for linux ? _noone_ )

    Linux is more and more a very efficient desktop os ,and it gains very solids technology years after years, but you can understand , for the moment, os X allows developpers to bring, more easily , great applications. the real underused advancement of Os x 10.4 is Core Image. Motion and Aperture gains greatly from that (you see that with huge video ram)

    I’m looking forward to see it in use in a drawing applications.

    17 years ago
  • Questionable

    Frankly, I’m a little skeptical about this program. Based on the Jumsoft track record of half-finished, buggy and apparently abandoned commercial software, I feel like all the excitement is premature. Yes, it looks great in screenshots and that video is interesting, but then again, Relationship looked great until you actually tried to use it.

    Pixelmator is very buzzword-compliant and looks spiffy, but it sounds like a lot of features to realistically implement in a 1.0 in a usable fashion.

    17 years ago
  • Appleblog

    Very promising!

    I cant wait for trying the first release.

    Good job guys.

    17 years ago
  • Simon MTL

    Wow, make an outstanding, useable & efficient “Magic Wand” or some other tool to cut out a face or an object out of a photo (which is THE main reason for all this layering and playing around, yes?) and I’m joining the club and getting some pro shops around here to switch! Hopefully it will allow use of other Core Video libraries for effects, that are available out there (just like ChocoFlop does).

    17 years ago
  • Tank

    Quite frankly, I think we’ve all been duped.
    Why are all the promotional images (and everything else!) created in Photoshop (just look at the headers for yourself)?
    It’s ready to be released next month, but it’s not ready to edit an image that is, presumably, just a screencap?

    Duped.

    17 years ago
  • frosty

    Hey guys, this looks really promising, and if you deliver in the next couple months and it doesn’t completely suck I promise I’ll buy a copy. 😉

    For all of us non-professional or even semi-professional image manipulators, Photoshop is just too heavy. Considering what I actually want and need for *most* of my image editing (pictures and websites, basically) Photoshop is absurd, never mind the cost. With good selection, good layering, and good type handling – and the rest pure core image – I think I’d be just fine.

    I hope you guys bust ass on this one and come out with a serious public beta next month, then a true, non-buggy 1.0 release before Christmas. This is a huge market opportunity. I was hoping ChocoFlop would fill this void, but so far it’s pretty seriously alpha (as the developer says) and I’m skeptical it’ll ever be more than a hobby project.

    @Tank, if I had to take a guess I’d guess the Text tool isn’t finished (those are a lot harder than they look) and so the Pixelmator guys used PS to do the site. My second guess is somebody else did it for them, since I kinda hope they aren’t spending time designing their website when they should be getting their beta ready.

    17 years ago
  • Rey

    The app looks great. It looks like it belongs on a Mac. One thing I would definitely need is a pen tool so that I could cut out objects precisely and have a clipping path for .eps images. I don’t see a mention of one on the spec page so I hope it is being worked on. If Adobe stayed true to its Mac roots I believe this is what Photoshop would look like.

    Great work guys.

    17 years ago
  • Allan

    nice work… looking forward to the release 😉

    17 years ago
  • EDIT-XTREEM

    Looks nice! One question… who took that screeencast? the guy spend half the time showing off that magical tool called the ‘eraser’!

    17 years ago
  • Mark

    Look, it LOOKS great, but you’re going to have to offer a trial version given all the bad feelings towards some of the Jumsoft products that LOOKED great but didn’t deliver in stability/useability. Wish you the best, but please take this suggestion to heart. I definitely will not buy before -I- actually try it.

    17 years ago
  • tripdragon

    Arrrggg to many floating windows ! 

    17 years ago
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    17 years ago
  • emma qxr

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    17 years ago
  • June Parrish Cookson

    Hi,

    I’m a new mac user and love my iMac. Presently, I have Adobe CS for pc and discovered that doing a crossover platform to mac is too costly right now. Furthermore, as an artist on the hunt for an image editor that would possibly meet my artistic criteria and budget, this looks very enticing.

    Wishing you all the best on your promising venture. And big applause to two guys who obviously have worked very hard to provide a new alternative to Adobe!

    Cheers,
    June

    BTW, does Pixelmator support CMYK?

    17 years ago
  • AdobeFanatic

    I didnt tryed pixelmator but it looks the same whith photoshop, maby its the complete copy of idea how will loock an image editor software what it need or how it will work or …, that thing what adobe inventing for a long time and now is easy to change the name from photoshop to ??? and make an photoshop killer.
    I heate the fact that pixelmator wouldnt work on linux, i think linux is the platform that much more need it ( something like photoshop ), there is the gimp but they doesnt work so much on it and its so far from photoshop and i think this software (pixelmator) can help linux to take much more % on PC.
    Sorry for my english

    17 years ago
  • Vaporware

    Firstly, I just want to smack everyone who defends Gruber – who is so ignorant of the meaning of vaporware (and of course, not can eat his hat).

    All those who echo his entirely baseless assumption that this is vaporware, and then agrees as he tried to wriggle out of it.

    Vaporware isn’t promoted software that hasn’t been released yet. Because. Every. *&$*&$. Piece. Of. Software is promoted before it is released.

    Vaporware is something that doesn’t exist. Not something that is days, months or even years from finishing.

    What an idiot he is. Trying to semantically wrestle his bitter writing into sounding like a mere unemotional use of nomenclature.

    Gruber is an idiot.

    16 years ago
  • Rakesh PK

    I think linux need this software. This is a good alternative for photoshop. If this is released for linux, it will become very popular.

    14 years ago
  • Graeme

    Demo’d it, loved it, bought it. Ready to buy a load of licenses for my office, if only it was ported to Linux. Guys, there is a HUGE gaping hole in the pro market for a Linux version of this application.

    14 years ago
  • Mirek2

    +1 for a Linux port

    13 years ago
  • Dan

    Hello,

    Pity there will be no Pixelmator for Linux kind OS.
    I understand your ideology but thinking about market, nowadays Linux is one of the best places to start a huge pro market. Many people underestimate the power of Linux and misunderstands the opensource licensing thing and the ideology of freedom.

    Would be nice to see Pixelmator for Linux so if there would be a voting, one ore vote for Linux port.

    Anyway, Pixelmator is a really cool image editor, the more people could use it the better.
    Regards,

    Dan

    13 years ago