14 DAY TRIAL // Apple next year plans to deal a blow to all amateurish photo-editing apps by releasing its own Photos app for OS X customers. Photos will push Aperture out of the spotlight, but we have a feeling it will not be able to barge Pixelmator, the Photoshop alternative for Mac users.
Despite not packing every single editing tool found in the highest-graded photography apps available on the market today, Pixelmator can certainly hold its own. And even more so in version 3.3.1, which brings a number of key features that users have been rooting for.
What's new in Version 3.3.1
The Pixelmator Team was careful to include not only fixes, but also some new functionality in this update. Chief among those new abilities is pinch-to-zoom support, which enables far more flexibility for trackpad users, requiring less input via buttons and sliders. In fact, we sense that those who spend hours in front of the program have just popped open a bottle of champagne reading these lines.
Next up, you can resize and scroll Shapes, Gradients, and Styles palettes, and the horizontal scrollbar is now properly visible, just like document’s lower area. An issue where Control-clicking the canvas didn’t bring up the shortcut menu has been addressed, and the Info bar now shows X and Y coordinates as it should.
You can now minimize the app with a simple double-click of the title bar, something that many users will undoubtedly also appreciate, and changing the size of palettes is now more responsive, as is the Zoom Tool’s slider.
If the Pixelmator folder didn’t always appear in iCloud Drive for you, version 3.3.1 should have addressed that issue. Any memory leaks experienced with Magic Wand and Paint Bucket have been eliminated. The rope glitches in effects are no longer there, and corrupt palettes are a thing of the past as well.
Stability and reliability
Update 3.3.1 also makes the app more stable and reliable, according to the development team. In the team’s own words, the new version “Fixes related to stability and reliability, including issues that could cause Pixelmator to quit unexpectedly or hang in [certain] situations.” Those include: when using Pixelmator actions in Automator, when exporting to JPEG and PNG, when exporting slices, and when copying or pasting grouped layers.
The company has opened up a mailing list where customers can jump in and receive the latest updates. To download Pixelmator, you need an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks) or newer.
