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Is there any way this can go bad? When Apple acquired DarkSky, they absolutely destroyed a service that I loved and relied on. Four years on, Apple Weather is

Is there any way this can go bad? When Apple acquired DarkSky, they absolutely destroyed a service that I loved and relied on. Four years on, Apple Weather is less reliable than DarkSky, and not even close to feature complete. But DarkSky was a cross-platform service, whereas Pixelmator is software that's already Apple-only. I'm wondering how much I should be worried, and if I should already be abandoning ship.

leshenka 2y ago
Can't you just zip the current PixelmatorPro.app and use it in case you won't like where things are going?
mikey_p 2y ago
I dunno, I thought "sherlocking" wouldn't be a thing if they acquired instead of duplicating their solution in-house, but it's the same effect, just more equitable to the original creators.
bromuro 2y ago
DarkSky wasn’t available in app stores other then US so I don’t even know what are you talking about :(
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- prophesi 2y ago
  It started off only using the USA's National Weather Service as a source[0] but gradually added international support[1]. But even then, outside of the US/UK, you would have been better off finding an app that you know uses your region's weather stations. [0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oliviadam/dark-sky-hyperlocal-weather-prediction-and-visuali#h:Where-the-radar-data-comes-from https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oliviadam/dark-sky-hype... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190110174010/https://darksky.net/dev/docs/sources https://web.archive.org/web/20190110174010/https://darksky.n...
  - jbverschoor 2y ago
    Nothing beats the buienradar
lucianbr 2y ago
There's always a way. On the other hand, does it help to worry? I don't think you can influence Apple.
ablation 2y ago
Why worry about something you have no control over? Keep using it, but be exploring alternatives now in case it does. Don't waste energy fretting over this.
- bbor 2y ago
  I mean, we're on a forum. There's not much else to discuss on forums than the past and the future.
- latexr 2y ago
  I feel like those ideas are contradictory. Exploring alternatives just in case is wasting energy. For example, for months I’ve been thinking of trying Inkscape to replace Affinity Designer, yet I keep putting it off because I’m not exactly enthused about the idea of having to learn yet another vector app again and deal with all its bugs and quirks.
  - robotresearcher 2y ago
    Exploring is not wasted. Fretting is wasted.
    - latexr 2y ago
      It is wasted, because in this situation you’re forced to do it. If you end up not switching, all the time you spent trying something else comes to nothing. If you do switch, you were still forced to spend a bunch of time looking for something.
      - shermantanktop 2y ago
        For me, "nothing" is rarely true. When I've had to learn a tool that operated in a different way, I've often come away realizing that I could think about a common task differently, or that there are capabilities I didn't realize I wanted. I this case I'm thinking of domain-specific tools meant for creation or curation, like an IDE, image editor, word processor, etc. That wouldn't apply to bureaucratic paperwork-type tools, where learning the site is typically a one-off and is pure waste.
crazygringo 2y ago
As a longtime user of both: > Apple Weather is less reliable than DarkSky Doesn't seem that way to me. The predicted rain over the next hour looks the same as it did in DarkSky, and you can view the scrub the predicted clouds map timeline and see that it's predicting the same stuff. And the real-life quality where I live has shown no change, nor is there any obvious reason why there would have been. I presume Apple bought DarkSky for their tech rather than their userbase, so it wouldn't make any sense for them to reduce its computational quality. > and not even close to feature complete. To be honest, I don't really remember what else was in DarkSky, I just used it for its main feature -- rain over the next hour. But the Apple Weather app has a ton of features. Is there one or more specific features you're missing? I think it sucks for Android users that Apple bought it. But for iOS I've been totally happy to have it integrated, rather than dealing with 2 separate apps.
- sleepybrett 2y ago
  I think weather is ... fine. I liked darksky better, it was more focused and less cluttered. It's purely a design, not functionality thing for me.
- grahamj 2y ago
  I was (selfishly) happy with the acquisition because DarkSky didn't support where I live. Now I have hyperlocal rain notifications I didn't get before.
- lynndotpy 2y ago
  I miss the visualization, but IMO the biggest feature loss is the history feature. You could select any day in the past, even going back decades, and get historical weather information. The hyper-local rain forecasts were always accurate for me with DarkSky. The "rain starting in 3 minutes, stopping in 10" was accurate. But right now, Apple Weather is telling me it's cloudy and raining where I'm at, and I'm looking outside my window to clear skies and dry ground.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Yeah, Apple Weather is not even accurate 95% of the time in north eastern Toronto 1 hour ahead… And sometimes it’s bizarrely off, like saying the UV index is 1 on a cloudless June afternoon. There’s no sanity checking to speak off.
layer8 2y ago
It’s likely that the focus will be less on making power users happy. That’s usually the consequence of such acquisitions.
blihp 2y ago
The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... most of what you liked about Pixelmator is likely no more over the next year or two. Depending on Apple's reasoning for the acquisition (i.e. how much of it was just for the talent vs the product) you'll may see some small glimpses of Pixelmator's influence a couple years from now in Apple's stuff. Most of the time Apple doesn't keep the acquired product around.
- askafriend 2y ago
  Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt. The difference here is how aligned the original team is with their acquirer...down to the corner radius on every button. With other products like Dark Sky, the product is substantially different in philosophy or design.
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app and Apple doesn’t actually want to have a separate image editor (let alone two). They used to have Aperture competing with Lightroom and then decided pro photography wasn’t a space they needed to be in, has something changed where now they want their own Photoshop competitor?
    - zarzavat 2y ago
      This would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app.
      - wlesieutre 2y ago
        Dark Sky would've added more value if they'd just renamed it Weather and made it the built-in app, and yet... I do hope they'll offer Pixelmator as an included app on Macs and Pixelmator Pro alongside Logic, Finalcut, and other "Pro" software. The lack of a built-in image editor can be annoying. Photos works for some stuff, Preview includes basic adjustments too, but sometimes you just want something like a hue/saturation adjustment instead of color temperature and pink/green tint, or multiple layers so you can experiment with different edits non-destructively.
whalesalad 2y ago
LOL. Yes, of course. It'll probably go terribly.
stronglikedan 2y ago
Can you get MyRadar on iphone? It's no DarkSky, but it's the best replacement I've found (for Android at least).
HumblyTossed 2y ago
> Is there any way this can go bad? 6 months they'll realize they can't fit in with Apple's culture and most of the team will hit the road.
- saaaaaam 2y ago
  You'd assume that their new deal with Apple will involve a certain amount of stock based comp with a cliff. Golden handcuffs.
archagon 2y ago
Apple is all-in on services revenue. They could decide to switch this to a subscription model just like their most recent pro apps.
- dwaite 2y ago
  Pixelmator already has been switching products over to subscription.
  - archagon 2y ago
    It looks like they still offer a lifetime IAP, though.
    - yunohn 2y ago
      Yeah and I just bought one a month ago… Really sucks, I feel like I probably won’t even get a full year to use it.
madeofpalk 2y ago
On the other hand, Testflight has a pretty good acquisition story. It got "merged into main" and is now a first class citizen of the iOS development ecosystem. Workflow being acquired and turning into Shortcuts is a pretty successful outcome IMHO. Beats still continues to make slightly cheaper headphones. FoundationDB is still there. Apart from Dark Sky, what other products with users has Apple acquired and shut down? Being acquired by Apple doesn't seem to be the obvious death knell that it is for other companies.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I wish every acquisition improved the end product as much as Workflow's did. All Apple's OSes got better for embracing it. I can write and have written AppleScript things, but Shortcuts is a vastly more convenient UX for the things it's good at.
  - azinman2 2y ago
    What do you use it for?
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      Let's see, I have 157 shortcuts defined at the moment. That wasn't due to some mass effort, just a bunch of little things that accumulated over time. I have one shortcut that shares the song I'm currently listening to in Apple Music to Mastodon. I use iA Writer for my work notes, and another shortcut creates a new note with today's date with wiki links to yesterday's and tomorrow's notes. (I use that one with Keyboard Maestro: if I'm in iA Writer and press F2, it opens that note (or creates it if it didn't already exist)). One runs on a cron job and copies any new links I've added to GoodLinks to my Pocket account so that it'll sync to my Kobo. Here's one that runs a custom sorting script on my OmniFocus projects. This one dims my office lights; I use Keyboard Maestro (again) to link it to one of the buttons on my Stream Deck. Basically, for me it's the equivalent of shell scripting for GUI apps. I wouldn't want to write a whole app with it, but for quick and dirty automation jobs it's terrific.
    - 2y ago
shagie 2y ago
You can get WeatherKit cross platform. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/weatherkitrestapi https://developer.apple.com/documentation/weatherkitrestapi https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/ https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/ - the pricing is comparable to the original - https://web.archive.org/web/20150811201137/https://developer.forecast.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150811201137/https://developer... (Apple: 1M calls is $50, original 1M calls is $100) "Alexa, ask Big Sky for the weather" - https://imgur.com/oRLTe04 https://imgur.com/oRLTe04 Notice in that upper left corner the credit for the source data.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
Coming from the perspective of a non-DarkSky user, the DarkSky acquisition added tons of value for me. Apple's iOS Weather app is better than it's ever been in terms of accuracy and feature-breadth. It seems that Apple made things worse for the (small number of) DarkSky users while improving things for (a huge number of) default-app users. I hope they do the same thing with Pixelmator.
- judge2020 2y ago
  I've heard that Apple Weather is much less reliable nowadays outside of the U.S., but I agree that it's super accurate for me on the East coast of the states.
  - cageface 2y ago
    It’s worthless in Thailand. I was checking it last week with a Thai friend here in Bangkok. The forecast was clear skies while in fact we had an epic monsoon storm. This is typical here.
    - strogonoff 2y ago
      A fun fact about ITCZ is that you will simply not find a reliably correct weather forecast. In places like Bangkok or (depending on the season) Hong Kong locals normally know to use the weather radar. Once going on a hike with a friend we got stuck amid torrential rain which for 40 min pretty much affected a less than 1x1 km area centred on the bench (with a roof) where we sat down. We knew it from the radar, since all apps showed mostly sunny weather. I didn’t bring the umbrella since it was supposed to be sunny and estimated cumulative precipitation was insignificant—who knew it would all fall directly on our heads! The radar won’t give you a forecast, but (if you are lucky to not get hit by weather developing on top of you) show you an animated map of where in town all hell is breaking loose now vs. where it was 15 min ago and you make your own conclusions. Newer versions of Weather app include a mini map of precipitation in some areas but I assume not all local radars agree to feed it their data, and even if some do the extra moving parts involved in getting and processing the data introduce too much of a lag for real-time weather developments. I doubt optimising that is Apple’s priority. I enjoy a good poking fun at weather apps (back then Dark Sky, now Weather) as much as the next guy, which is exceedingly easy while you are in ITCZ, but the reality of fluid dynamics on this big rotating ball is such that some places worry about a cold front they can see coming days in advance while others live in weather that may develop within minutes right there and then. Guess in which of the two do most paying customers live!
al_borland 2y ago
While I am also very sad about DarkSky, it doesn't always go that way. Shazam was purchased by Apple many years ago, and many people have no idea. It still a stand alone app, but got control center options and Siri integration (even for those who didn't have the app installed). While the app does push Apple Music a bit, it's largely clean and without other ads, which would probably not be the case if they were still on their own. How Pixelmator goes will largely depend on their plan. Do they want an app in this space, the spiritual successor to MacPaint, or did they just want the underlying tech (and maybe the team) to add a couple features to Photos? If it's a new value-added app, I think it's great. If they are just going to add some minor tweaks to Photos and throw the rest away, that would be pretty horrible. I was a Pixelmator user from its launch, but switched to Affinity a few years ago. If Apple does something good, I probably won't be tempted to buy the next version of Affinity whenever it comes out. I'm a very occasional user.
thfuran 2y ago
I think a company anywhere near the size of Apple being permitted to acquire another company is, in and of itself, bad.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> Is there any way this can go bad? Development can stagnate. This isn't a huge trend with apple but it's the obvious answer.
makeitdouble 2y ago
The question usually goes "can this go better ?" Pixelmator was a successful team with a polish product and happy customers. What Apple brings to the table is money I guess, but was that a critical issue the company was facing ? The talent could bring a lot of good to other Apple products, but I guess Pixelmator as a product has reached its peak at this point.
59nadir 2y ago
I think it's more relevant to ask "Is there any way this can end well?". Unless a company is basically down and out an acquisition, especially by a mega-corp, is basically never going to make things better. When Microsoft bought GitHub it actually seemed like GitHub started working more on developing their product, but this quickly turned into essentially starting to do the same busywork every other big tech company does with lack of quality control, pointless reshuffling of UI components in places, embarrassing deficiencies in what should be obvious and exposed places. So, on a long enough time frame even (observed positive) promising acquisitions seem to turn into bad deals.
- agos 2y ago
  And now seemingly working only on Copilot. The release notes of Visual Studio Code used to begin with accessibility, an indication of commitment to an important pillar of their software. But the KPIs have moved, and now Copiloy takes the spotlight
quitit 2y ago
In view of how AI is changing graphics tools, my guess would be that Pixelmator's pay-once business model didn't bode well for long term competitive viability. We've already seen Affinity switch into releasing a "v2" after years of updates, and on the other hand hobby apps like LightTricks get far more out of their subscription services, despite being a consumer grade template-based app. As for how it will be run. I'm guessing that Apple will just be their backer like they do for Claris. I don't imagine a MacPaint style app returning to macOS, but sharing code between the two to enhance mark-ups, the photos app and the like seems likely. For random conjecture: this may also mean Pixelmator grows into the AR space.
valval 2y ago
I can’t think of any Apple software that doesn’t get the job done, isn’t straightforward about its capabilities, and isn’t easy to use. Their whole shtick seems to be just that. A minority of people will always prefer to use competing products, if for nothing but sentimental reasons. That’s fine, as such market will always exist.

leshenka 2y ago

Can't you just zip the current PixelmatorPro.app and use it in case you won't like where things are going?

mikey_p 2y ago

I dunno, I thought "sherlocking" wouldn't be a thing if they acquired instead of duplicating their solution in-house, but it's the same effect, just more equitable to the original creators.

bromuro 2y ago

DarkSky wasn’t available in app stores other then US so I don’t even know what are you talking about :(

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
prophesi 2y ago
It started off only using the USA's National Weather Service as a source[0] but gradually added international support[1]. But even then, outside of the US/UK, you would have been better off finding an app that you know uses your region's weather stations. [0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oliviadam/dark-sky-hyperlocal-weather-prediction-and-visuali#h:Where-the-radar-data-comes-from https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oliviadam/dark-sky-hype... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190110174010/https://darksky.net/dev/docs/sources https://web.archive.org/web/20190110174010/https://darksky.n...
- jbverschoor 2y ago
  Nothing beats the buienradar

lucianbr 2y ago

There's always a way. On the other hand, does it help to worry? I don't think you can influence Apple.

ablation 2y ago

Why worry about something you have no control over? Keep using it, but be exploring alternatives now in case it does. Don't waste energy fretting over this.

bbor 2y ago
I mean, we're on a forum. There's not much else to discuss on forums than the past and the future.
latexr 2y ago
I feel like those ideas are contradictory. Exploring alternatives just in case is wasting energy. For example, for months I’ve been thinking of trying Inkscape to replace Affinity Designer, yet I keep putting it off because I’m not exactly enthused about the idea of having to learn yet another vector app again and deal with all its bugs and quirks.
- robotresearcher 2y ago
  Exploring is not wasted. Fretting is wasted.
  - latexr 2y ago
    It is wasted, because in this situation you’re forced to do it. If you end up not switching, all the time you spent trying something else comes to nothing. If you do switch, you were still forced to spend a bunch of time looking for something.
    - shermantanktop 2y ago
      For me, "nothing" is rarely true. When I've had to learn a tool that operated in a different way, I've often come away realizing that I could think about a common task differently, or that there are capabilities I didn't realize I wanted. I this case I'm thinking of domain-specific tools meant for creation or curation, like an IDE, image editor, word processor, etc. That wouldn't apply to bureaucratic paperwork-type tools, where learning the site is typically a one-off and is pure waste.

crazygringo 2y ago

As a longtime user of both: > Apple Weather is less reliable than DarkSky Doesn't seem that way to me. The predicted rain over the next hour looks the same as it did in DarkSky, and you can view the scrub the predicted clouds map timeline and see that it's predicting the same stuff. And the real-life quality where I live has shown no change, nor is there any obvious reason why there would have been. I presume Apple bought DarkSky for their tech rather than their userbase, so it wouldn't make any sense for them to reduce its computational quality. > and not even close to feature complete. To be honest, I don't really remember what else was in DarkSky, I just used it for its main feature -- rain over the next hour. But the Apple Weather app has a ton of features. Is there one or more specific features you're missing? I think it sucks for Android users that Apple bought it. But for iOS I've been totally happy to have it integrated, rather than dealing with 2 separate apps.

sleepybrett 2y ago
I think weather is ... fine. I liked darksky better, it was more focused and less cluttered. It's purely a design, not functionality thing for me.
grahamj 2y ago
I was (selfishly) happy with the acquisition because DarkSky didn't support where I live. Now I have hyperlocal rain notifications I didn't get before.
lynndotpy 2y ago
I miss the visualization, but IMO the biggest feature loss is the history feature. You could select any day in the past, even going back decades, and get historical weather information. The hyper-local rain forecasts were always accurate for me with DarkSky. The "rain starting in 3 minutes, stopping in 10" was accurate. But right now, Apple Weather is telling me it's cloudy and raining where I'm at, and I'm looking outside my window to clear skies and dry ground.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Yeah, Apple Weather is not even accurate 95% of the time in north eastern Toronto 1 hour ahead… And sometimes it’s bizarrely off, like saying the UV index is 1 on a cloudless June afternoon. There’s no sanity checking to speak off.

layer8 2y ago

It’s likely that the focus will be less on making power users happy. That’s usually the consequence of such acquisitions.

blihp 2y ago

The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... most of what you liked about Pixelmator is likely no more over the next year or two. Depending on Apple's reasoning for the acquisition (i.e. how much of it was just for the talent vs the product) you'll may see some small glimpses of Pixelmator's influence a couple years from now in Apple's stuff. Most of the time Apple doesn't keep the acquired product around.

askafriend 2y ago
Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt. The difference here is how aligned the original team is with their acquirer...down to the corner radius on every button. With other products like Dark Sky, the product is substantially different in philosophy or design.
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app and Apple doesn’t actually want to have a separate image editor (let alone two). They used to have Aperture competing with Lightroom and then decided pro photography wasn’t a space they needed to be in, has something changed where now they want their own Photoshop competitor?
  - zarzavat 2y ago
    This would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app.
    - wlesieutre 2y ago
      Dark Sky would've added more value if they'd just renamed it Weather and made it the built-in app, and yet... I do hope they'll offer Pixelmator as an included app on Macs and Pixelmator Pro alongside Logic, Finalcut, and other "Pro" software. The lack of a built-in image editor can be annoying. Photos works for some stuff, Preview includes basic adjustments too, but sometimes you just want something like a hue/saturation adjustment instead of color temperature and pink/green tint, or multiple layers so you can experiment with different edits non-destructively.

whalesalad 2y ago

LOL. Yes, of course. It'll probably go terribly.

stronglikedan 2y ago

Can you get MyRadar on iphone? It's no DarkSky, but it's the best replacement I've found (for Android at least).

HumblyTossed 2y ago

> Is there any way this can go bad? 6 months they'll realize they can't fit in with Apple's culture and most of the team will hit the road.

saaaaaam 2y ago
You'd assume that their new deal with Apple will involve a certain amount of stock based comp with a cliff. Golden handcuffs.

archagon 2y ago

Apple is all-in on services revenue. They could decide to switch this to a subscription model just like their most recent pro apps.

dwaite 2y ago
Pixelmator already has been switching products over to subscription.
- archagon 2y ago
  It looks like they still offer a lifetime IAP, though.
  - yunohn 2y ago
    Yeah and I just bought one a month ago… Really sucks, I feel like I probably won’t even get a full year to use it.

madeofpalk 2y ago

On the other hand, Testflight has a pretty good acquisition story. It got "merged into main" and is now a first class citizen of the iOS development ecosystem. Workflow being acquired and turning into Shortcuts is a pretty successful outcome IMHO. Beats still continues to make slightly cheaper headphones. FoundationDB is still there. Apart from Dark Sky, what other products with users has Apple acquired and shut down? Being acquired by Apple doesn't seem to be the obvious death knell that it is for other companies.

kstrauser 2y ago
I wish every acquisition improved the end product as much as Workflow's did. All Apple's OSes got better for embracing it. I can write and have written AppleScript things, but Shortcuts is a vastly more convenient UX for the things it's good at.
- azinman2 2y ago
  What do you use it for?
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Let's see, I have 157 shortcuts defined at the moment. That wasn't due to some mass effort, just a bunch of little things that accumulated over time. I have one shortcut that shares the song I'm currently listening to in Apple Music to Mastodon. I use iA Writer for my work notes, and another shortcut creates a new note with today's date with wiki links to yesterday's and tomorrow's notes. (I use that one with Keyboard Maestro: if I'm in iA Writer and press F2, it opens that note (or creates it if it didn't already exist)). One runs on a cron job and copies any new links I've added to GoodLinks to my Pocket account so that it'll sync to my Kobo. Here's one that runs a custom sorting script on my OmniFocus projects. This one dims my office lights; I use Keyboard Maestro (again) to link it to one of the buttons on my Stream Deck. Basically, for me it's the equivalent of shell scripting for GUI apps. I wouldn't want to write a whole app with it, but for quick and dirty automation jobs it's terrific.
  - 2y ago

shagie 2y ago

You can get WeatherKit cross platform. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/weatherkitrestapi https://developer.apple.com/documentation/weatherkitrestapi https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/ https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/ - the pricing is comparable to the original - https://web.archive.org/web/20150811201137/https://developer.forecast.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150811201137/https://developer... (Apple: 1M calls is $50, original 1M calls is $100) "Alexa, ask Big Sky for the weather" - https://imgur.com/oRLTe04 https://imgur.com/oRLTe04 Notice in that upper left corner the credit for the source data.

ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago

Coming from the perspective of a non-DarkSky user, the DarkSky acquisition added tons of value for me. Apple's iOS Weather app is better than it's ever been in terms of accuracy and feature-breadth. It seems that Apple made things worse for the (small number of) DarkSky users while improving things for (a huge number of) default-app users. I hope they do the same thing with Pixelmator.

judge2020 2y ago
I've heard that Apple Weather is much less reliable nowadays outside of the U.S., but I agree that it's super accurate for me on the East coast of the states.
- cageface 2y ago
  It’s worthless in Thailand. I was checking it last week with a Thai friend here in Bangkok. The forecast was clear skies while in fact we had an epic monsoon storm. This is typical here.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    A fun fact about ITCZ is that you will simply not find a reliably correct weather forecast. In places like Bangkok or (depending on the season) Hong Kong locals normally know to use the weather radar. Once going on a hike with a friend we got stuck amid torrential rain which for 40 min pretty much affected a less than 1x1 km area centred on the bench (with a roof) where we sat down. We knew it from the radar, since all apps showed mostly sunny weather. I didn’t bring the umbrella since it was supposed to be sunny and estimated cumulative precipitation was insignificant—who knew it would all fall directly on our heads! The radar won’t give you a forecast, but (if you are lucky to not get hit by weather developing on top of you) show you an animated map of where in town all hell is breaking loose now vs. where it was 15 min ago and you make your own conclusions. Newer versions of Weather app include a mini map of precipitation in some areas but I assume not all local radars agree to feed it their data, and even if some do the extra moving parts involved in getting and processing the data introduce too much of a lag for real-time weather developments. I doubt optimising that is Apple’s priority. I enjoy a good poking fun at weather apps (back then Dark Sky, now Weather) as much as the next guy, which is exceedingly easy while you are in ITCZ, but the reality of fluid dynamics on this big rotating ball is such that some places worry about a cold front they can see coming days in advance while others live in weather that may develop within minutes right there and then. Guess in which of the two do most paying customers live!

al_borland 2y ago

While I am also very sad about DarkSky, it doesn't always go that way. Shazam was purchased by Apple many years ago, and many people have no idea. It still a stand alone app, but got control center options and Siri integration (even for those who didn't have the app installed). While the app does push Apple Music a bit, it's largely clean and without other ads, which would probably not be the case if they were still on their own. How Pixelmator goes will largely depend on their plan. Do they want an app in this space, the spiritual successor to MacPaint, or did they just want the underlying tech (and maybe the team) to add a couple features to Photos? If it's a new value-added app, I think it's great. If they are just going to add some minor tweaks to Photos and throw the rest away, that would be pretty horrible. I was a Pixelmator user from its launch, but switched to Affinity a few years ago. If Apple does something good, I probably won't be tempted to buy the next version of Affinity whenever it comes out. I'm a very occasional user.

thfuran 2y ago

I think a company anywhere near the size of Apple being permitted to acquire another company is, in and of itself, bad.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> Is there any way this can go bad? Development can stagnate. This isn't a huge trend with apple but it's the obvious answer.

makeitdouble 2y ago

The question usually goes "can this go better ?" Pixelmator was a successful team with a polish product and happy customers. What Apple brings to the table is money I guess, but was that a critical issue the company was facing ? The talent could bring a lot of good to other Apple products, but I guess Pixelmator as a product has reached its peak at this point.

59nadir 2y ago

I think it's more relevant to ask "Is there any way this can end well?". Unless a company is basically down and out an acquisition, especially by a mega-corp, is basically never going to make things better. When Microsoft bought GitHub it actually seemed like GitHub started working more on developing their product, but this quickly turned into essentially starting to do the same busywork every other big tech company does with lack of quality control, pointless reshuffling of UI components in places, embarrassing deficiencies in what should be obvious and exposed places. So, on a long enough time frame even (observed positive) promising acquisitions seem to turn into bad deals.

agos 2y ago
And now seemingly working only on Copilot. The release notes of Visual Studio Code used to begin with accessibility, an indication of commitment to an important pillar of their software. But the KPIs have moved, and now Copiloy takes the spotlight

quitit 2y ago

In view of how AI is changing graphics tools, my guess would be that Pixelmator's pay-once business model didn't bode well for long term competitive viability. We've already seen Affinity switch into releasing a "v2" after years of updates, and on the other hand hobby apps like LightTricks get far more out of their subscription services, despite being a consumer grade template-based app. As for how it will be run. I'm guessing that Apple will just be their backer like they do for Claris. I don't imagine a MacPaint style app returning to macOS, but sharing code between the two to enhance mark-ups, the photos app and the like seems likely. For random conjecture: this may also mean Pixelmator grows into the AR space.

valval 2y ago

I can’t think of any Apple software that doesn’t get the job done, isn’t straightforward about its capabilities, and isn’t easy to use. Their whole shtick seems to be just that. A minority of people will always prefer to use competing products, if for nothing but sentimental reasons. That’s fine, as such market will always exist.