Plaidophile

Even without a successful Kickstarter funding campaign, Mark still finished his Net Neutrality PSA. Go take a look, and if you're in the United States, write your congressperson!

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I'm trying Pixelmator yet again. It's made a lot of positive progress since the last time I wrote about it in detail (especially regarding its pressure-sensitive brush engine, which is now just as good as Photoshop's), but there's still a bunch of stuff that could be better, and which still keep me from switching:

• Selection refinement (still) isn't particularly useful. There needs to be a way of growing/shrinking by a specific number of pixels (rather than percentage), and keyboard access to those values (right now only "smooth" ever gets keyboard focus, for some reason)
• There (still) needs to be a brush set on a per-tool basis, rather than globally. Having to constantly switch between a small brush (for sketching and inking) and a large brush (for erasing) sucks. (This is the main thing that stops me from switching.)
• It would be nice if there were automatic non-destructive layer styles like in Photoshop; in particular, I use Stroke a lot, and not having that is really irritating.
• Magic Wand and Paint Bucket (still) need a way of restricting their area based on the full image, not just on the current layer.

Every version gets a lot more features that add gee-whiz factor, but none of them seem to address what I feel are basic workflow issues for producing art digitally. If the Pixelmator guys would at least acknowledge these requests on their forum I might feel more confident in my purchase (which I've made again thanks to the categorical App Store transition), but I'm starting to get a bit worried that they don't actually care.

Bynkii wrote his thoughts on why Android phones are not Google phones:

Folks, there's been one Google phone. One. If you don't have a Nexus One, you don't have a Google phone. You have a <CARRIERNAME> <HARDWAREMANUFACTURER> <MODEL> running <modifiedversionofAndroidrelease>. The only thing Google has to do with those devices is that last part. They put out a version release and associated reference materials for each Android release. But you're not running that, are you? Not unless you've jailbroken/rooted your device you aren't. You're running a modified version that <CARRIERNAME> told <HARDWAREMANUFACTURER> to put on the <MODEL> you bought.

I agree with his conclusion that Android phone ≠ Google phone, but I disagree with his reason. I posted a comment there, but for my own purposes I've repeated it here.