Pixelmator looks great at first try, but using it for a real project reveals hidden bugs and annoyances
A while ago I was considering retiring my Photoshop license for a cheap and well defined solution from the Pixelmator Team. Their app – Pixelmator has been a huge success, generated millions of income and a lot of praise. As a power user of Photoshop I tested it and was pleasantly surprised at first. Aside from the lack of still a few important functions (layer styles) it seemed like it can transform the industry and steal some cake from the big brother.
Unfortunately after using it for my professional project (that was a one time try, because actually doing something for work is the best test ever) I found that it’s ridden with bugs and annoyances. First of all – the selection tool is terrible – it sometimes selects something quite different than intended, the selected areas move outside of the screen for no reason. Yuck. They supposedly fixed it in 2.0, but I encountered the problem a couple of times still.
The definitely most annoying thing it the text, that you create with otherwise pretty decent type tool. Normally the text box (in Photoshop) has a safe area that covers it’s height and width including higher and lower letters. Well in Pixelmator it appears to be the same, but there’s on little change. If you have two text layers, with the smallest possible safe area and they’re not overlapping at all, you can only select the top layer by CMD + Clicking on it. The only way to select the bottom layer is to select it from the Layer palette, and that simply sucks for larger projects. It appears as if the text that’s on the top layer has a magic shield around it that forbids you to easily reach other text. Sure it might be fun for a photo with a helvetica, pseudo typography Paulo Coelho quote on it, but as soon as you add another text you’re screwed.
Inconsistency is another thing that’s worth mentioning – if we change the app design for that nice looking black overlay, why do we still use the native color picker, the native extended font chooser? Besides the native color picker doesn’t have the built in hex value on every tab, rendering it quite useless for webdesigners.
So yeah, that’s a little bit of bitc**** in the morning, but I can’t help it – at the current state Pixelmator cannot be used in professional design without irritation and slower pace. Hopefully they’ll fix it and enhance the features.