May 17, 2012

Pixelmator 2.0.4 Sandboxing

Hot on the heels of our update last month, we’re pleased to bring you Pixelmator 2.0.4. With even more improvements and, oh, so many of the fixes you’ve told us you want, we think you’ll agree that this update—our third this year—is a great one.

First, I don’t want to brag, but with this new version, Pixelmator is one of the first apps on the Mac App Store to integrate support for sandboxing.

Pixelmator sandboxing

Apple’s App Sandbox technology provides a line of defense for your Mac, so your data is safer and better protected.1 Kudos to Apple for making it available.

Other major improvements in Pixelmator 2.0.4 include a new way to open and save files that automatically maintains the highest image quality possible. This simple workflow uses the native Pixelmator format to preserve image data as you edit, so images always look their best. Take a look at our brief tutorial explaining how it works. ?

And there’s much more to love about 2.0.4. With over two dozen additional fixes for known issues and several new stability improvements, we hope this update will see you through until the upcoming release of Pixelmator 2.1. We are proud of the hard work we put into this and every Pixelmator update—and we hope it shows!

1 Translation: Sandboxing is good for Mac users, so we’re glad to dive right in.

Comments

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

  • MarekZeman91

    Great! You’re still awesome!
    Thank you for this great update 🙂

    12 years ago
  • Cykelero

    Quick updates, nice.
    However, that means that we can’t easily edit images in-place anymore, doesn’t it? That would mean I now have to keep an old version of Pixelmator around if I want to be able to quickly correct screenshots.

    Also, I’d be really interested on knowing what’s your stance on quick palette hiding using the tab key. The removal of this, and of the ability to freely pan around the image without it being limited by screen borders, have made Pixelmator much less suited for digital drawing, so I’m sure there’s a good reason those things are gone. I was thinking that perhaps you wanted to reintroduce those features later as part of a larger, themed update, but if that’s the case I guess you don’t really want to reveal anything about it yet.

    Anyway—regardless of that, Pixelmator is great, this is a rather enduring fact.

    12 years ago
  • Kenn Ejima

    Your color theme on this blog is incredibly unreadable. I can’t read the content at all. (and couldn’t find the name/email field in the reply form)

    12 years ago
  • Charles

    Wonderful! I hope you ficed the bug gradients and strokes. Inner stroke just doesn’t work anymore.

    12 years ago
  • Kyle

    Very good with a new update so soon, but I was becoming quite attached to the autosave feature. Like one other person already wrote how to quickly adjust a non-pxm file now? I’m sorry to be blunt but you basically should have stayed with how things were ‘fixed’ in version 2.0.3. You basically bugged, broke or removed Lion’s autosave feature. Makes me wonder if you really have any clue what you are dealing with here. Do you test your software for usability? I mean like going through scenarios based on how people use or might use your software? No offence, you are trying your best, but these kind of things are just not thought through enough. Why you don’t give the user a choice on opening. Like a warning message like this:

    “You are opening a ???-file. If you edit this filetype and close the document or Pixelmator the file gets autosaved and you might risk to loose data. Do you want to open the file as a duplicate in stead?”

    Now that cannot be too hard? In 2.0.4 you are forcing people to use the pxm-format. Not a good idea. It isn’t a widely available standard folks.

    I also agree on the other posters about the website. It cannot be that time-consuming to change a view color-codes here and there.

    Keep on the ‘good’-work and looking forward to getting a Pixelmator that is Lion-compliant, which means full support for autosave.

    12 years ago
  • Andrew Bednarz

    I’d just like to also register my disappointment that it is no longer possible to quickly load, edit and save a PNG file. No more can you double-click, edit, press cmd-S and then cmd-W. After pressing cmd-S you now have to do 3 mouse clicks (with appropriate mouse movements), then his cmd-Q and another mouse movement & click to say “no don’t save in PXM”. Very much slows down the work flow 🙁

    If this is due to a sandboxing restriction, then please say so, so we can file appropriate reports with Apple.

    12 years ago
  • Mikael

    Might as well chirp in here also, you borked autosave and you borked workflow with this approach. Im at loss as to what problem you though this would fix, with the preference for turning on/off autosave in 2.0.3 people had the choose they always wanted. So what exactly does this ‘Improved workflow for opening documents’ fix? Because as a far as i can see, this only has

    a) worsened the workflow for everyone visavi a quick open/save
    b) borked autosave for everyone using that feature

    Maybe if you told us your thought behind this move it would shed some light on these changes.

    12 years ago
  • Cykelero

    Wow—I hadn’t noticed this before, so I guess it’s been introduced in this last update. Now when viewing documents in Versions, they are zoomed out to fit the window! That’s actually fantastic for my workflow: I usually work with very large images, so a 100% preview like before is rather useless since it shows a small part of the image only. Now I can use Versions to its full potential! That is great.

    12 years ago
  • Dave Miers

    Way to censor your negative blog comment pixelmator. I see your critics comments including mine have been deleted.

    12 years ago
  • Duffman

    “Way to censor your negative blog comment pixelmator. I see your critics comments including mine have been deleted.”

    You are not alone man. BTW I just subscribed to Adobe PS CS6 monthly subscription. Very cheap and you will stop losing your time with this pixelmator crap stuff.

    Moreover, the PS CS6 one is just amazing. For one time, Adobe did a good job.

    12 years ago
  • Dave Miers

    @Duffman agreed PS CS6 is awesome. However it’s a shame pixelmator can’t fill a spot where I don’t want to load PS just for a quick edit. v2.0.3 was awesome in Lion for doing just that. Often times I need quick crops to a ratio, but I need to do it myself so batching won’t work. Without having to go through the save process it doubled my speed working these images. Everything being converted to pxm, a format I’ve never saved to, took all that goodness away. I as I’m sure others will not do heavy lifting in pixelmator as it doesn’t support my needs there…and won’t begin to until there are better selection tools, and a selection can round trip to an alpha channel, a mask and back to the selection. But it sure was nice for light work in v 2.0.3….so we’ll see if this gets deleted

    12 years ago
  • Pawel

    Since Pixelmator 2 I just moved away from Adobe as far away as I could (same with Dreamweaver – Coda by Panic!) . Pixelmator was not only a cheaper alternative, was way faster and I loved Ihow it worked, even the lion-style autosafe. Wanted to quickly crop a photo? 2 seconds and done, no shortcut to safe – just crop and exit. And suddenly … a change … an update that somehow reminds me of Adobe’s style meaning NEWER VERSION EQUALS SLOWER WORK. Now somehow pixelmator starts way slower and I don’t even know how to safe an altered jpeg. All of this was mainly because loads of people used for 50 years Photoshop and complained about autosave with pixelmator. Pixelmator was the greatest tool ever, please – just let me downgrade to the previous version! I can even pay for that !!

    12 years ago
  • Pawel

    “several new stability improvements” ??

    Well now it opens slower. Any reason for that “improvement”? I really love you guys, I bought this soft long time ago, will always love you regardless of your next moves but mind that you might end up like psd.

    12 years ago
  • Franco

    Why don’t you listen to your customer? Most of us don’t like the colour of the blog, most of us want the language release like in 1.x, most of us find the sw getting slower and slower. Please listen to us otherwise most of we could move somewhere else. keep in mind the customer satisfaction!

    12 years ago
  • Michael

    I’m going to assume this is a side-effect of defaulting to the new PXM workflow, as that format won’t bounce back out to Aperture – using Pixelmator for round-trip external editing with Aperture is now broken. Please fix that.

    12 years ago
  • Jonas

    Thank you for your great work! Thank you for improving PSD support!

    12 years ago
  • Ralf

    May I quote your website “Has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images” but 16 bit support for editing and export. This is what I miss since version 1. Makes it a no-go for my photo editing.

    12 years ago
  • Marc Driftmeyer

    I’ve never read so much trolling for an incredibly well priced piece of quality software, especially against a subscription priced and bloated software suite like CS6, in years.

    Grow up folks. You don’t like the sandboxing, then get used to better security because Adobe will be moving to this, and so will any sane developer.

    This reminds me of the internal whining at Apple when we NeXT folks arrived and Steve removed the on-site Espresso vendor with all the fears of losing my coffee/latte’s, etc., only to see these crows be silenced with FREE replacements in the Cafe–another conversation full of whining until they saw what he did.

    Pixelmator devs continue to impress with their limited resources and wise use of Cocoa APIs, and all for a small price. Hopefully, their next major release will silence all the chirping going on that turns out to be nothing more than a bunch of trolls.

    12 years ago
  • Anon Cowherd

    @Marc Driftmeyer

    I see a new Apologist has arrived. Will you be taking over hamsta’s and Drew’s duties? -Those two seem awfully silent these days. It’s as if they’ve had to face reality.

    Did it look like the sandboxing was people’s main concern in this thread, or did you just use that as a distraction?

    Why would being “subscription-priced” be a bad thing? I doubted you were at NeXT, but figured I’d google your name just in case. Apparently you actually were there, as a software tester.

    12 years ago
  • Curtis Hard

    Id very much like to know how you know you are one of the first to support sandboxing on the store? Its impossible to claim…, just had to click the enable entitlements button, not really difficult.

    12 years ago
  • Jan

    To avoid using pirated software I happily bought Pixelmator back in version 1. It worked great for my basic needs of getting some things out of the photos with layers. But the 2.0.4 has broken my “backtrip” Aperture workflow, meaning that I am no longer able to complete the following: Export from Aperture (works)->Process in Pixelmator (works)->Closing/Saving the processed file (keeps telling me I do not have permission or some other crap, and forces me to save the file to my desktop and then manually import it into Aperture – WASTE OF MY TIME!!!). Previously I was just able to close the file and I was see a new version in Aperture with new master file created. What is up with that?!

    Since in 2.0.3 this worked, I deleted the 2.0.4 with AppZapper and restored 2.0.3 via TimeMachine back up.

    Just for those who might run into the same trouble!

    I hope this really gets fixed soon.

    12 years ago
  • Mark Rushton

    Loving Pixelmator. It arrived at the perfect moment – had to upgrade to 10.7 Lion, and my old CS2 suite wouldn’t cut it anymore. Great value and fabulous feature-set. Any of the features that I feel are lacking, I’m quite confident will be dealt with in later releases.

    Let me note one of those features… as noted in previous comments, its a bit of a pain to have Pixelmator force us to save the file in PXM format. I understand new documents defaulting to the Pixelmator-native format, but if I need to make a quick adjustment to an existing JPG or TIFF, I want to be able to:

    – drag the image onto Pixelmator on the dock
    – make my adjustments
    – Command-S to save in the existing format without any dialogue box
    – Command-W to close the window and get on with my life.

    It shouldn’t be difficult to tell Pixelmator to respect the original file format… right?

    Looking forward to the next point-update. You guys rock!

    12 years ago
  • Drew

    @Anon Cowherd
    Did you call me? I didn’t have to fate anything…just had more important things to do than reply to immature comments 😉 and actually still do!!

    Loving Pixelmator even more now with sandboxing!!!

    Oh and i am not an apologist just happen to be someone who likes stuff and doesn’t complain “just cause i can”.
    Ciao….oh and thank you for calling!!

    12 years ago
  • PsykX

    We haven’t had any detail about Pixelmator 2.1 since we’ve known about its existence 7 months ago.

    What’s happening ? Will we see a lighter interface, Layer Styles, etc. ?

    12 years ago
  • Fingermouse

    Still using 2.0.3 – from the comments here it looks like upgrading would be a big mistake. Shame I now can’t click the ‘Update All’ button in the App Store but it’s a small price to pay to be able to edit images directly rather than using the PXM workflow.

    Pixelmator 2.0.3 is ideal as a quick editor for round-trip editing. I have Photoshop CS6 for any heavy lifting – if I have to export/import every file then I might as well go back to PS for everything. The extra work the PXM workflow introduces negates the extra time it takes to open and run Photoshop.

    12 years ago
  • Fingermouse

    Okay, no sooner do I write the above then 2.0.5 appears in the App Store. Think I’ll still wait before updating, though – no information about it anywhere yet. Fingers crossed that it’s fixed the problems caused by 2.0.4!

    12 years ago
  • Kyle

    Thanks for the 2.0.5 which solved a lot of issues. I agree with the one person who was allowed to post a comment on the the latest blog post. Why not make Autosave and Default document options in the preferences? I still find forcing us to use the PXM-format by default an arrogant move. Luckily one of your support staff used the time to make life easier for those who would like to have an easier way to turn autosave or default document format off, with some scripts. For the rest of the team it seems you are just sticking your tongue out to me and giving me the finger. I’ll try Pixelmator again, if I find more arrogant crazy stuff I’m done with you guys and over to Acorn or something else. You have a potentially great product but your arrogance and inability to give your customers at least an explanation or an apology for f*cking up is out of this world. You risk loosing your credibility and customers. I sincerely hope you are back on track again with 2.0.5 but more uneducated misses and I’m off.

    12 years ago
  • Drrew

    @Kyle
    Bye bye!

    12 years ago
  • hamsta

    @Kyle
    See Ya!!!

    12 years ago
  • Sandboxman

    I’m glad you’re using sandboxing now, but it’s funny to hear it described as you “dove right in”.

    Sandboxing has been available to Mac apps for a year. Apple originally said they were going to make it mandatory for App Store apps last November, and then pushed back the deadline to March, and finally to this June.

    Sure, you’re probably one of the first apps on the App Store to do it. Then again, there are some really bad apps in the App Store. Pixelmator is one of the good ones, and it rightly has that reputation because you guys have held yourselves to a much higher standard than simply being better than average. I hope “waiting until the last minute to do it, three times, over the course of a year” doesn’t become a new pattern.

    12 years ago