Plaidophile

Okay, I learned that Pixelmator will have tablet support VERY SOON (on their Twitter page they announced that they finished implementing it about 11 hours ago, so of course the next release will really have it like they sorta-promised on their forums). So I decided to give it another shot, bearing in mind that tablet support would be coming.

It's pretty close to decent, though I still have a few complaints with it. Nothing that'll prevent me from buying it when 1.1 comes out, but there are many things I'd like to see them fix in the (preferably near) future:

• All brush drawing is still managed at the pixel level, rather than the subpixel (even when zoomed in), so drawing isn't as natural as it could be. I already do all my drawing at a much higher resolution to mitigate the fuzzy brushes in Photoshop, so that's not necessarily a huge problem, though I'm concerned it might make lines somewhat jagged even when drawing zoomed-in (which is how I usually work).
• The selection refinement tools aren't very workflow-friendly. On the plus side, they can be opened up by keyboard (unlike in Photoshop), but on the minus side, they don't maintain their previous settings (also unlike in Photoshop), and you can't really change the values in any reasonable way from the keyboard either (also unlike in Photoshop) - so while Photoshop gets one aspect wrong, it gets the other two right, and the other two are important when you do a lot of selection-tuning as part of, say, a coloring process
• The magic wand tool doesn't support selecting on the merged image; neither does the paint bucket tool.
• No keyboard command to select the layer you're on - sure, Photoshop doesn't have that either, but the merged-image wand tool mitigated that problem for me (since I could make selections relative to one layer while working on another)
• No equivalent to Photoshop's "blend effects" that I could find (specifically Stroke and Drop Shadow, which I use for my speech bubbles)
• How much time did they spend implementing the physics model for the effect generator selection point interface when they could have just drawn a straight line, which would have been more clear anyway? (I know, recreational programming like that helps to keep programmers sane, so it's not like that silly feature really took away from other "real" development time, but, still...)
• It'd be nice to have something like Photoshop's "save for web" function. Not absolutely vital (I can easily just incorporate ImageMagick into my workflow instead) but it was nice to have an interactive preview of how the image would look in png vs. jpeg and at various compression levels.
• The "distort" transform is rather buggy. Hopefully it works well enough for what I use "free transform" for in Photoshop, though.
• Also it'd be nice to have some vector drawing tools, but that definitely brings it into the "reasons why Photoshop costs as much as it does" territory.
• It'd be really nice if each tool had its own separate brush setting. When I use the smear tool I always want a large, soft brush, and when I use the brush tool I usually want a small, hard brush. It'd be nice if each tool remembered its most recent brush setting.
• Resizable and dockable palettes
• The ability to swap color swatch sets (so I can have one set for Unity, one for Pernicious, etc.). Being able to name the colors would be nice, too.
• Text alignment modes other than "left"
• An ability to type a partial font name (rather than having to mouse around in the font list, although the latter is mitigated by the fact it uses the system font selector so at least I can use FontBook).
• Also while I'm harping on the text tool, it'd be nice if a text selection were transparent (or, better yet, inverted, like in Photoshop) so you could see the image under it
• It'd also be nice if you could move a text layer around while it was still active for editing (rather than having to switch between the text and move tools)
• Basically the text tool is rather weak right now (though from my previous survey of drawing apps I've learned that it's actually PRETTY GOOD compared to most, which is just sad for the other apps).
• There seem to be some niggling bugs with window focus, too. Switch to another app, then click on the Pixelmator document window - and the Pixelmator app doesn't always take focus. (I can't seem to find the rhyme or reason for this though, and I can never duplicate it when I'm actually trying to. Go figure.)
• The gradient tool is also very weak. It'd be nice if there were a way of building the gradient ad-hoc like in Photoshop or GIMP rather than needing to actually set up a preset. I mean, seriously. (Though props for actually using the system color selector, meaning being able to select any color anywhere on the screen. I appreciate touches like that, even though it actually means less work for you.) In particular it'd be nice to be able to quickly get a gradient for foreground-to-background and foreground-to-transparent, and a way to switch between linear and radial. (It'd also be extra-hot if it had a live preview of the gradient while the tool itself was being manipulated!)
• A way of constraining marquee selections to be square/circle would be nice. Right now there IS some sort of a constrain mode but it makes no sense and makes me think they actually meant to do a square constraint but accidentally subtracted instead of adding, or something.
• Ooh ooh ooh and also, polygonal and magnetic lasso. (And Bezier polygonal! That'd fix most of the missingness of the vector drawing tools.)
• Um... straight-line drawing would be nice.

Obviously I should stop playing with Pixelmator before this list gets way too long and basically just turns into "clone Photoshop." Depending on how large their dev team is, this list is probably already at least three months' worth of work...