Have you guys ever heard of DrawIt?
It’s been around for some time now, but we’re about to release version 3.0 in a few days:

check it out

all the lower end image editing programs on mac suck compared to what is on windows, as ironic as that may be.

adobe won’t even give us mac users the latest version of their lighter weight elements program.

paintshoppro XI on windows is quite an impressive piece of software - there is nothing comparable in that price range on the mac

You’ll notice the article simply posed a series of questions

Yes, questions such as “I think what really turns me off about all of this is that all of these image editors do, more or less, the same thing” and “Do all of these developers really believe they are bringing something new and beneficial to the table? Or is it simply a case of jumping on the bandwagon?”
Simply insisting that commenters misunderstood your article is a bit insulting. Your point is rather clear; you are turned off by these apps, and you clearly imply that developers are bringing nothing “new and beneficial” to the table. You’re making a fair point, and you’re entitled to your opinion, but many disagree. Why not discuss their opinions with them instead of claiming that you didn’t really mean what you wrote?
So back to the topic, then.
I think your idea that there can be too many applications is wrong, as long as we have tools to weed them out (see: macupdate.com). The FTP market is a good example of a market which works. There are many excellent applications to choose from. There’s competition. And there are a lot of crappy apps, but hopefully their devs are learning something, and maybe their next app is a contender in its area, or maybe they’ll manage to turn their FTP app into the next Transmit. Who knows. But the fact that these apps are available aren’t hurting my use of Interarchy, just like the fact that your blog is available doesn’t hurt me when I read joelonsoftware or daringfireball.

While the author presents an interesting perspective, I disagree wholly. For starters, when I looked for an FTP app for my new Mac, I didn’t think the Mac market was flooded with FTP programs. I was struck by the paucity of good options. The PC world has excellent FTP apps both free and commercial. The Mac has a handful of overpriced apps and CyberDuck. If FTP’ing is your full-time job, a $40 FTP app is great, but for rare use, give me a good selection of “sub-par” programs to select from.

For a “creative” platform, it’s ironic that the Mac has fewer good image editor choices than the PC. None, basically, in the hobbyist market. So my reaction to seeing these announcements was not one of doom, but “It’s about time.” I don’t know how a dark cloud is seen first rather than the silver lining.

Photoshop is the new MS Word (overkill and painful to use ) and I found NO solutions under 50$.

I cheerfully welcome both apps.

I think what really turns me off about all of this is that all of these image editors do, more or less, the same thing

WHA??? Have you even used these apps? I am currently using both Pixelmator and Acorn heavily, and they have rather different feature sets. Not to mention the simple fact that both are version 1s (or below v1). It’s little wonder that they can’t compete with Photoshop yet, although the final version of Pixelmator may replace Photoshop on my Mac for 99% of all cases.

Frankly, I’ve never been so happy about the image editing market on the Mac since the 90s when Photoshop last had some competition. Your criticism seems petty and unfounded.

Do all of these developers really believe they are bringing something new and beneficial to the table?

I hope they do, because they are, and they have every reason to be damn proud of what they have achieved.

As for me, I can envision a point in time when the image editor space does become supersaturated. It’s possibly for image editors because it’s already happened for FTP apps, as pointed out. If it can happen for one class of apps, it can happen for any other.

I do see a need for mid-grade image editors (and Pixelmator is a very good entry in this space; quite a nice product). It’s a void that needs to be addressed. But, should there suddenly be a deluge of dozens of imitators and clones, then yes, they become harmful (at the very least unhelpful) to the consumer.

As for Gruber’s comments, I usually agree with him, but Joe (#22) nailed it.

The post talks about how the fact that 3 new image editors have been announced or released in the matter of a few weeks got me thinking about what the “breaking point” is for there being too many. I didn’t make claims that the the image editing app genre is overcrowded. I questioned whether it was getting there or if there was even a point at all that it even could be overcrowded.

I’m not sure how else to say that.

So now come what seem to be the first all-around sub-$100 image editors. How can this possibly be like the over-population of FTP apps?

I’ll be buying one of these new image editors but I totally agree with #17 Mike Perry on his point about “Tagged Text Editor and Translators”

When are we going to have a truly professional “Write Once Publish Everywhere” workflow that isn’t hacked together or custom built? Who will build this? Apple?

But, you know, guys? Great new UI ideas and simplicity and other things are cool, but I would like a feature from Photoshop 1.0. Seriously. That feature is dodge and burn tools. I really don’t think I should have to pay for Photoshop (or suffer with the non-Intel Photoshop Elements or, uh, non-Euclidean GIMP) to have this.

You know, I’d probably pay US $50 for a good Mac-native clone of Deluxe Paint III. But don’t suggest Pixen, cos that app seeems to be totally dead now.

There was a market for these editors, and rightly so, a few smart developers saw that opening and decided to fill the gap.

Three new image editing apps hardly constitutes the same flood we have in the FTP arena. Competition is good, and so far, both Acorn and PixelMator tackle the problem in different ways.

The more the merrier. After playing with Acorn, and the first beta of PixelMator, I’m excited to see what Iris can bring to the table. All these apps bring competition to Adobe, which can only be a good thing for everyone.

Jeesh, I never thought I’d hear someone say there were too many apps for the Mac, but that’s exactly what I’m hearing….

The real key to these apps’ success will be their compatibility and interoperability with the Photoshop format – the same kind of battle that Apple iWork and Neo/OpenOffice.org face with Microsoft Office. Right now I have a feeling that Pixelmator will end up handling this best, but that presupposes that it will be released in the next few millennia, doesn’t it ;-).

1. Text-to-iPod Audio Book. The application that would take a Project Gutenberg book and turn it into an audio book, broken down into titled chapters, and then place it on an iPod as an audio book. Double CRs would indicate a new chapter whose title would be the first line that follows. It’d multiply the number of available audio books a thousand fold.

2. Tagged Text Editor and Translator. All the major text handling applications from HTML and Word to InDesign, Quark and FrameMaker have a tagged text interchange format that tags paragraphs (i.e. Heading 1) and blocks of text (Italic) with what they mean. What’s needed is an application that can read any of these formats, stripping out irrelevances like font and size, let users edit the tags, and then write them out to any other application’s format in that application’s tagged interchange format. And no, this isn’t an XML editor. XML has too many complexities.

3. Recording Classroom Notetaker. Students, bloggers and others use their Macs to record and take notes. Why not combine both into one application? Users would take notes while their Mac recorded someone speaking. The notes would be tagged with the point in the speech recording where they were made. To clarify or elaborate on those notes, clicking on the text would play the audio recorded at that time. A slower-without-pitch-change mode would let it be used for transcription.

–Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien

Cough. Snrk. Bwahahah. Ok good one.

I would rather not have to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 and deal with their draconian activation, so I’m looking forward to some image editor alternatives. I doubt I use 20% of Photoshop 7 right now.

Sure, Core Image helps make this easier, but there is still a lot of work involved going from Core Image to Image Editor.

I’m holding out for Core Mail and then hopefully we can get some alternative email apps!

That said, I don’t think IE7 has done all that great, I’m setting up a corporate network for a client of mine, and the director explicitly requested Firefox be installed on all the machines because he “discovered it the other week and thought it was much better than all that Microsoft crap”.

This is turning out to be quite a discussion isn’t it

Richard

But with each app brings something new to the table (minus a few, of course). These apps can then build off each other, hell, even acquire each other.

Even Photoshop has features that used to be in indie applications, and everyone is innovating in one way or another.

So the reality is, we need more competition, not less.
Rich

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns