Pixelmator: promising start, but that's about it.

The other day I stumbled across a program called Pixelmator. I played around with it a bit in order to try to perform some of the tasks I usually need to perform on photos I've shot.

The first thing I noticed was that it doesn't read RAW files. OK, no big deal, I can make Bibble spit out something that Pixelmator can read. Then I tried to do some standard color tweaking; fiddle around with levels, contrast, saturation etc. Even before I had gotten to dig deeper into the app, things ground to a halt.

No, I mean the thing literally just ground to a halt.

The thing spins the dreaded rainbow mini-pizza (for those of you not using OSX: the "I'm busy" cursor) constantly and even things that should be quick and simple, like drawing a gradient or opening the "levels" dialog box, take forever.

Huh!? Why the hell is it doing that?

The short verdict: not useful software. Yet. But I'd check back in 6 months to a year.

However, if someone had labeled it an alpha version, called i a work-in-progress I would have had completely different expectations. As an alpha version of an image editing program I would have said that it looks promising, but it still needs significant amounts of work. Heck, if the makers had asked for donations instead of selling the software I would have chipped in because I would have had more reason to believe that eventually there will be a decent, working product.

Selling this as a finished product just makes me suspicious.