So I had the big “2.0” for a couple of days now and I can honestly say that it ALMOST got me to the point where I can sell my Photoshop license and go have a party for the money. Sure it’s lacking CMYK support – but most printers nowadays even for big posters prefer RGB anyway, or even no color profile at all. The most annoying thing is lack of Layer Styles, but I’m almost sure they’ll turn up in some 2.x iteration sooner or later. The other annoyance is the color palette which is not a part of the Pixelmator interface, just like the previous type tool was. It should be more streamlined, easier to use and better looking (better UX)
The rest of the added tools are good and/or sufficient for day to day creation, and it’s now possible to do website layouts and posters, which could’ve been done in PXM before, but not without frustration. Now it’s ALMOST completely there, and I’m starting the slow (and potentialy painfull) move towards it instead of the big brother. The Vector Tools are AMAZING by the way – and Adobe could learn a thing or two from the Pixelmator Team on this one.
With Hype and Purple hitting the Mac App Store there are also nice and cheap tools for HTML5 animation, so being a designer on a budget loses the dogma of doing crappy products because of underpowered tools. The tools are there, now it’s up to us to get that creativity rolling.
I think PXM 2.0 is 9 out of 10 stars, but it’ll surely get to the whole 10 in the next couple of months. Good!