We've been having interesting times in the world of Photoshop alternatives. Here's the executive summary. Pixelmator moved to the App Store priced to sell ($29.95). Basic idea: there's no migration path from existing license to App Store license so let's just sell Pixelmator at the price we plan to charge for 2.0 upgrades and see how it goes. Answer: $1M in three weeks. It's not like most of Pixelmator's deficiencies have really been addressed in the last... eighteen months, but it's Good Enough apparently. Well played! Acorn retains its "very distant number two" position and is still trying to sell for $49.95. I assume the App Store price is the same but I can't see it because it's marked as "Installed" on all my Macs for some reason. It's sold at least a few copies in the App Store since there are seven reviews. My guess is that Flying Meat has not made a tiny fraction of $1M. Naked Light — the conceptually promising node-based image editor that never ships — has appeared in the iOS App Store (where it averages three stars, apparently). If it's as slow running on an iPad as it is on a Mac that would be bad, but I suspect it's even slower. Photoline just revved to 16.5. Aside from gesture support and a few UI tweaks (not enough though!) it doesn't seem like such a big upgrade. (Upon examination, there seem to be a lot of significant improvements "under the hood", e.g. some of the layer effects are much more polished. But I did redo my icon. Autodesk Sketchbook Pro is in the App Store (along with a very capable free version, Sketchbook Express). The Pro version is now $49.95 (d'oh, I should have bought it when it was selling for $14.95). Compared to Art Rage, Sketchbook is more like a really good digital painting program than a faux media program. Art Rage 3 is out, but sufficiently expensive that I baulked at the "discounted" upgrade price and stuck with Art Rage 2.5. (I did get Art Rage for the iPad which is excellent, if sluggish, and superior in many respects to Sketchbook).

Disruption from iOS Players

I suspect we'll see some migration of successful products from iOS to the Mac App store, which may make life very unpleasant for "established" players such as Art Rage (being undercut by Autodesk — who'd have thunk it?) or Intaglio (which got its clock cleaned on iOS and may find the apps that cleaned its clock there coming to haunt it on the Mac). Pixelmator may find itself competing with, say, Art Studio or Photogene. Somewhat ironically, one of my favorite apps on the iPad is Adobe Ideas (I even paid $5 for the layers function). I wonder if we'll see it ported to the Mac App Store.