A couple of days ago, without much fanfare a great new Mac application, Pixelmator was released. Despite the relatively lack of interest of the mainstream Mac press, this is major news.
Despite what graphic pros may say, Pixelmator is a direct competitor to Photoshop. Granted, it does not offer yet advanced capabilities such as 16 bit per channel images or even RAW support (although it seems that this particular feature will be included later this year in a future update), but for most of us, Pixelmator, with its great user interface, small memory footprint and perfect integration with Core Image, is a perfect replacement for the much more expensive Adobe product.
Personally I see this announcement, as the culmination of Apple’s strategy to reduce their dependency on Adobe without having to create a Photoshop competitor themselves. It is probably a surprise to many that it took so much time for developers to use Core Image to create a photo editor. After all, Core Image is available since Mac OS 10.4 which was released two and a half years ago. Apple had done most of the hard work by providing a powerful API to easily composite layers and support non-destructive filters. Why did it then take so much time to create such a product? Well, it seems that everyone believed that Apple would use Core Image to create their own Photoshop competitor. Competing against Adobe is difficult enough but if you have to take on both Adobe and Apple that is a really scary thought. That is why I am not really surprised that Pixelmator was created by two young brothers who probably have not much to lose, even if this project does not become an instant hit. However, I sincerely hope that their app becomes extremely popular. They deserve it and the Mac community needs more innovative developers like them who are willing to take risks. I have already paid my US$59 license. Will you?