Pixelmator

Just came upon a nice new OSX application: Pixelmator.

I have been holding off on the Adobe Photoshop CS3 upgrade, which will provide native performance on my Intel MacBook. CS2 in the interim has been workable, albeit a touch slow.

Start Up Time
Here are the start up times (with a million other apps open):

Photoshop CS2: ~ 50 seconds (first start) Closed app, second start: ~20 seconds.
Pixelmator: <2 seconds

Resource Consumption

This is what activity reporter shows after opening both applications (not actually doing anything).

Photoshop CS2: ~130MB RAM / 1GB Virtual / 3-4% CPU
Pixelmator: ~30MB RAM / 400MB Virtual / ~0.5% CPU

Intitial Impressions

It starts blindingly fast. It looks beautiful. It opened a PSD file created in Photoshop fine, retaining it's layers. At first glance it appears to contain many of the essential Photoshop functions I use on a regular basis.

At $59, this application definitely deserves a closer look!

Have you tried Pixelmator?

If so, what do you think? Anything missing? Any special features that should be noted?