Tonight finally Pixelmator, the quite hyped new image editor for the Mac, has seen its first public release. And since I was actually looking forward to it, I gave it a try right after waking up …
... just to be immensely disappointed. First of all: The price. 59USD???!!! I had expected something around 40USD, so 60USD is definitely more than I’m willing to pay, since its competition for me is GIMP/Seashore, which is free. Anyway. Perhaps the price is justified if the feature-set is good enough. Let’s see.
But the first thing I noticed when wanting to play around with the pencil tool was, that I couldn’t even draw a straight line … According to the official forum the easiest way to get something like a straight line is to draw a pixel and then use the transformation tool. This is probably the most complicated way, that I’ve ever seen. And there doesn’t even seem to be a shortcut for accessing this tool. Same goes for forcing straight gradients. Also missing as far as I can tell.
The gradient tool also IMO lacks an easy way to just get a gradient that spans the fore- and background-color. But apart from that, the options here are really nice.
These are just a few tools of Pixelmator I’ve played around with so far, but I’m not sure if this app is really worth the 60USD in its current state. I also currently see no way to really extend it with plugins or additional filters. Well, at least there seem to be plans to support custom CoreImage filters.
I really hope, that the developers will improve this app because it definitely has potential. But in its current state it simply lacks a couple of features that I really came to like in other tools.
P.S.: Adding a visible watermark to all images created during the 30-days trial period is really stupid and renders the tool useless during that period. Congratulations.
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