Is iPad the space race?

A place to talk about anything else with other Pixelmator users.
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2019-11-10 07:55:10

We just saw Adobe’s up-to-bat regarding their so-called real Photoshop for iPad. ( That’s baseball for my Lithuanian friends.) I don’t know how to run a software company, I’m just having fun thinking about it. Given their swing and a miss, it’s apparent Adobe is years behind what indie companies have now; stellar companies are making programs like Procreate and separately Pixelmator Photo. For the first time, one could say that the Indies have the advantage over the subscription-based behemoth, and should use this one-shot opportunity to draw blood.

Another indie competitor has a Photoshop-style product for iPad, but it is dreadful to use. It is clunky and straight-up confusing. Powerful as it is, however, they are afflicted with something that’s hard to cure: lack of taste. Pixelmator Pro has a beautiful, all-in-for-Apple UX design language. Photo is a FUN to use. If there was any time to do a painting component to the iPad—Pixelmator Photo Pro—with layers and good painting, now is the time to step up to the plate. :sunglasses:
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2019-11-11 09:56:12

You know, I think Adobe have done a pretty good job with Photoshop for iPad, they simply lost the narrative about the app as soon as it was announced. "Real Photoshop", which is a little ambiguous, turned into "Full Photoshop", which caught everyone's imagination and it was all over from there. Anyone who paid more attention to the details about the iPad announcement saw the feature set was going to be fairly limited but at least compatible with the desktop app, which is nice.

I guess I can empathise with the folks at Adobe because something not too dissimilar happened with Pixelmator Pro. The "Pro" part made everyone think that the app was going to be a more pro-oriented, extensively-featured version of Pixelmator, which wasn't really true. When the app came out, early reviews hammered us for this and a few other reasons. So I know how they're feeling over there. :smile:

I don't necessarily think we have any more or less of an advantage than before as our approach has always been different and we're targeting a different group of people. As long as there are people looking to do creative things with images on their devices and we keep making affordable apps that help them do so, we should be OK. And we'd love to create a layer-based image editing app for iPad to complement Pixelmator Pro, either by updating and enhancing the original Pixelmator or by releasing a brand new app, but there are certain technical/workflow things we'd need to solve with a potential Pixelmator Pro on iPad (its extensive nondestructiveness, specifically) before we could attempt to create/release a 1.0. As for Pixelmator Photo — will always be photo-oriented, with a workflow and tools optimized for working with single-layer photographic images. :wink: