waffle

Jesper

Stop using the word ‘appcast’.

Peter Hosey

Even on my blog?

Jesper

Stop using the word ‘blog’.

I don’t like being negative. But, I’m sorry, if you’re making a Photoshop clone, make it right.

• Okay, fine, do make all windows HUDs. It’s nice and trendy. It’s different and perhaps gimmicky, but I’m okay with that as long as it’s well implemented. However…

• …Do not make all the tools have really dark icons! The Type tool, the Crop tool and the Cursor/Move tool all have generally black icons. When the icons are unselected, they’re black, put against a black background, which actually is semi-transparent and may overlay a black backdrop; add that I’m clicking it with a black cursor carrying a black shadow. It’s like Hotblack’s fucking stunt ship. When the icons are selected, they are slightly bigger and put against a semi-transparent grey background. This is not helping very much.

• Speaking of tools, where is my customizable toolbar? It is my one serious Photoshop complaint aside from its price. I don’t use half of those tools - let me strip it down.

• Speaking of the type tool. I bring that up and I expect to be able to choose a font. I can choose a font. I just use the Fonts panel. The Fonts panel offers preview, but it has to be big to do that. Photoshop’s UI is about as subtle as one of these things, and they still have the sense to provide you with a bar-shaped palette for choosing the fonts there instead.

• No drop shadows. I can apply drop shadows to text using the Fonts panel’s crappy support for the awesome underlying Cocoa text foundation. That’s it. You can also make a duplicate layer, turn everything black, gaussian blur it and offset the bugger. And redo that every time you change anything. Compare and contrast to and with Photoshop’s layer effects with instant non-destructive application and live preview.

• Let’s try applying a perspective transform. Okay, nice. I can’t see the degrees or edit them, but I’ll live. My test object was up against the frame, so I’ve got to move it, let me switch to the move tool. I’m moving it, it’s showing right there in the layer’s thumbnail, but no, the prespective object is not moving. I cancel out of the transforming and the object is indeed moved.

Yes, bully on you for getting 1.0 out. It does look promising. And I will revisit later on. But I can’t personally commit to trying to use Pixelmator because it seems like I’d be more likely to hit up against the edge of what Pixelmator can do today than not.

Also, calling Photoshop “Big Brother” on that company weblog while aping its awful non-customizable toolbar and not aping some of its useful UI? Not cool. Right: it ain’t bragging if you can back it up. From what I’ve seen this far, it’s bragging; you don’t even offer a fresh new perspective like Acorn did with a 16th of the pretense. Get back to me when I can see the god damn tool I’m clicking on.

Update: This is not a review. And contrary to what Scott Stevenson thinks, written pieces don’t automatically turn into reviews because he thinks they look like reviews.

Update 2: Macworld’s “Creative Notes” weblog links here, saying “(Not everyone thinks Pixelmator’s interface is beautiful, however; see here for an alternative opinion.)”. I do think Pixelmator’s interface is beautiful. I don’t take offense in the beauty of the interface (other than note that using HUDs everywhere is giving off a gimmicky ting); I take offense in the interface being beautiful in precisely such a way that obscures what’s actually in the interface.

Exhibit A: The Virgin Digital music store will be shutting down shortly. Once the license lapses, you won’t be able to play all that music you bought. Another DRM proponent bites the dust.

Exhibit B: Amazon’s new Amazon MP3 music store. At $4.99 thru $9.99 for albums and $0.89 thru $0.99 for songs, it is the first non-theoretical non-bullshit use of variable pricing to always undercut or equal iTunes. At 256 kbps, you get sound fidelity that’s somewhere between iTunes and iTunes Plus (iTunes Plus songs also carry a 256 kbps bitrate, but are encoded in AAC - literally the successor to MP3) but at a lower price and in a more universal format (although you’d think the cavemen media players would have gotten AAC support by now). And with two million songs, a single policy of no DRM whatsoever and Windows and Mac clients that apparently don’t suck and only supplement your media players instead of trying to replace them, it’s hard not to rub your eyes.

I had my opinion of NetBeans done already. I had used it, and it had earned its badge. NetBeans is slow. Slower than a snail. With a broken hip. Standing in syrup. Cemented solidly to a piece of primary rock. It’s also got a horrible name.

This is still the case of course. But something happened over the period of the last two years or so that, while I was aware of it in a peripheral vision, wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if sort of way, I never really thought would pan out. NetBeans is still its barely passable self (by which I mean that it’s actually a respectable IDE; it’s not just great in the same way that other IDEs are to me), but NetBeans 6 has now got the best god damn understanding of Ruby of anything in the world, and it really does work wonderfully.

For a notable Java IDE, backed by Sun even, it seems like something totally out of left field. It’s been in the works for a while, and thanks to people like Tim Bray, Sun understands that Ruby can be beneficial to them. Tor Norbye has done an awesome job on the whole Ruby type inference engine, since implicitly-typed languages are notoriously hard to provide something as basic as sensible autocompletion for. Give the man the Nobel Peace Prize.

And that’s one more reason for me to get a faster computer.