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!”
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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Believe me, this is the most exciting day after many months of very hard, but fun work. Finally I can announce: Hello world, we are the Pixelmator Team!
I couldn’t wait to let all you wonderful Mac users know about us and work that we have been doing for the past few months. So, let me introduce ourselves.
We are a little Mac software company, called Pixelmator Team. Pixelmator Team was launched by two brothers a few months ago. Actually we launched the project first, then picked a name for our company. For a few months now, we’ve been developing one of the coolest Mac apps ever. We call it Pixelmator. It’s the real-Mac OS X image editing application. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here.) For now, I will not talk much about Pixelmator – we have many years ahead for that. Instead, I’ll tell you more about the people behind it: the Pixelmator Team.
So, my name is Saulius Dailide and I am one of the two brothers that are working in this company. I do business, user interfaces, project management stuff and develop this website. My brother, Aidas Dailide, is Mac OS X programmer. I can objectively say that he is one of the best I’ve ever seen. So, here we are – the Pixelmator Team.
We’ve been using Macs for more than ten years now. Our first Mac was Centris 650 – we enjoyed it so much that we started to study it, and we still are. Using Apple stuff, especially Mac, feels insanely great (you know what I mean). In fact, I just wanted to say that we love Macs and we proud of being part of Mac community. I guess, that’s why we are into Mac software business.
What I did not mention is that we co-founded another Mac software company six years ago. That company is called Jumsoft and is still alive and well. Jumsoft was one of the journeys that brought us to where we are today. It taught us to make Mac apps and to market them (but not how to write blog articles). We learned many exciting things and met many wonderful people at Jumsoft. And I want to say big thanks to Jumsoft and Jumsoft customers who, by purchasing Jumsoft software helped us build our next big thing, that we think is going to be a giga thing.
Pixelmator Team is one of the most magical things in my life and Aidas would definitely agree. We’ve never been happier to wake up in the morning, start our Macs (I use MacBook Pro, while Aidas uses a black MacBook) and start polishing Pixelmator. Imagine every single day you find something very exciting and you make it and the next day you have it all running (I am talking about Pixelmator, of course). That’s the atmosphere at Pixelmator Team and I hope you will feel the same when you run our software.
That’s enough about us for now. If you didn’t find what you are looking for – don’t worry – we’ll be talking about it and the stuff we do very often. If you really can’t wait, check out our company site, our flickr photos or take a sneak peek at Pixelmator – it’s worth it.
Should you have any questions, comments or ideas for our blog don’t hesitate to contact us or just simply join the discussion in our blog comments.
Hello World and stay tuned!
P.S. That is my first blog article ever. Please forgive whatever glitches are in it.
Founded by brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide in 2007, the Pixelmator Team today introduced Pixelmator, the world’s first GPU-powered image editing tool that provides everything needed to create, edit, and enhance still images.
“Finally, an innovative, fast, and easy-to-use image editor for Mac OS X that brings the power of todays expensive image production tools to every Mac user at a very affordable price,” said Saulius Dailide, Pixelmator Team. “We think all Mac people—home users as well as professionals—will find Pixelmator very usefull 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, albums, Smart Albums, and pictures in user’s Pictures folder. Best of all, the user can just drag-and-drop any of those images as layers in Pixelmator composition.
Another very important feature of Pixelmator is Automator support. Very powerful Pixelmator actions in Automator allow the user to quickly enhance, resize, or transform images, add any special effects, and even export images to more than 100 different file formats.
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, one will find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of Pixelmator operations, including editing tools, color correction tools, filters, and more. Pixelmator is lightening-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 16 color correction tools and 50 Core Image-powered filters, transform tools, fill and stroke, QuickMask mode, full-screen editing mode, Dashboard support, .Mac support, ColorSync support, Spotlight support, and much more.
Pricing & Availability
Pixelmator 1.0 will be available in late July for $59 (US). Full system requirements and more information on Pixelmator can be found at www.pixelmator.com
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