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?

Selecting the right tool for the job.

As web craftsman, learning new things is just part of the job description.

About 2 years ago I started learning Ruby, and then Ruby on Rails. I love working with Ruby on Rails. It is a great framework that has helped me to become a better programmer.

Nevertheless, as professionals, it is important that we avoid fanaticism and keep an open mind. We need to be able to clearly assess a business problem and select the best solution.

Selecting the right tool for the job sometimes means learning a new tool.

Thus, while I love working with Rails, I have found that it is not always a perfect fit. Many of the projects I work on are for small business sites. They implement CMS functionality, custom tailored to the needs of the client. Rails makes it productive and fun to create them. However, Rails also makes it expensive to host them. Each Rails instance (mongrel) has around a 70MB footprint. That's a big minimum footprint for these simple types of sites and clients with tight budgets.

Enter Merb
Today I found Merb. Merb appears to have many of the similar "best practices" of Rails that I have enjoyed, but aims to be lighter and faster. I have yet to test it out, but some sources seem to indicate it may cut the memory footprint in half (compared to Rails).

Perhaps for my small business website clients Merb will be the best tool for the job.

Have you used Merb? I'd love to hear your experiences or suggestions!!