The team behind Pixelmator has posted a lengthy apology on their blog following the discovery of a bug that would sometimes cause Macs to restart or the app to crash when intensively using the popular image editor.
It turns out, the newest Nvidia Geforce graphics card drivers in OS X 10.8.2 are causing the issue, and Pixelmator is working with Apple to resolve the issue.
Everything we do at Pixelmator Team is aimed at making your favorite app the best in the world. With every minor update, we strive to live up to a high-quality standard. We even put aside new features, such as layer styles, for the sake of quality improvements. So far, we are happy with what we’ve achieved. However, there is one issue we wanted to talk about a little bit more.
A month or so ago, after the most recent OS X update (10.8.2), we’ve bumped into a problem that causes certain Macs to restart when intensively using Pixelmator. Sometimes, the app would stop responding without restarting a computer, or just cause some graphical glitches.We did everything to find the root cause of the problem. We’ve researched a vast amount of information about OS X internals. We’ve torn down our Macs. We even reached out to Apple. Finally, the picture was clear: It’s an issue with Nvidia Geforce graphics card drivers.
Although the issue isn’t with Pixelmator, we didn’t give up. We’ve searched for various workarounds, and then, we checked with you to see if any of them helped (thanks so much for being so patient and for taking the time to test those workarounds). But in the end, nothing worked.
Good thing, though—the guys at Apple are very helpful, and as soon as we hear about a solution, we’ll let you know about it that very moment.
The affected Macs have GT 120, GT 320M, GT 330M, 9400M, and GT 9600 Nvidia graphics cards.
Top Rated Comments
Pixelmator is probably my most used application besides web and mail. Love to mess with photos and improve them.
The PM team is VERY responsive and forthcoming with information. That just binds me even closer to the product. Honesty and acknowledgement of "oops" increase customer base confidence.
Secrecy and silence have the opposite effect...
A few years back Nvidia shipped faulty graphics cards that would cause the whole system to overheat over time and cause other problems. Apple banned them for a while on their systems and it looks like Nvidia is back at it again. They better straighten up or they will lose a HUGE customer(apple).
Who writes Nvidia's Apple drivers, Nvidia or Apple themselves? Regardless, isn't it Apple's responsibility to properly test graphics drivers, especially given the mere handful of them officially supported on their hardware?
Not only is it not even close to Photoshop, it just doesn't work properly on so many basic tasks that it's silly. On top of that, the guys that run it have completed aped Apple's marketing style (over the top secrecy and silence).
I don't understand why people use it. It is incredibly poor. I really think it appeals to people who think they are clever for not wanting to use Adobe, but PS CS6 stomps all over Pixelmator. It's just an embarrassing thing at this point.