Next among Pixelmator 1.2's notable new features is a Polygonal Lasso tool to accompany the free-form lasso tool already present. There isn't much to say about this tool other than it works well, though Saulius told us this was one of Pixelmator's most-request features.

Last on the feature highlight list is Pixelmator's completely rewritten Transform tool. A number of transform features already exist in Pixelmator such as Skew, Distort, and Perspective, but the tool itself has been rewritten "from scratch to be more precise, faster, better and bug-free." This has also allowed Pixelmator to gain the powers of Free Transform, offering the standard bounding box around a layer with anchors that can be dragged any way you want. Free Transform works pretty well for what it is, though we noticed an odd behavior in it. When using Free Transform, layer edges will snap to guides and the canvas, but snapping doesn't work when moving the layer while still in the Free Transform mode.

Great, now if only they had a magnetic lasso.

In recent months, a lot of new image editors have appeared on the Mac platform. New APIs from Apple such as Core Image have allowed small, indie developers to create quite sophisticated image editing tools.

I've seen a few reviews of these applications, but the reviews mostly concentrate on user interface concerns. I'd like to do something different here; Instead of simply looking at their UI, I'd like to look at how these applications handle tasks I typically do. In this review, I'll look at three different tasks:

1. Stitching a few shots to create a panorama image
2. Adding a fancy title to a picture
3. Creating a simple pixel image

I will not look at fixing levels, exposure and the like, since iPhoto does a pretty good job at that, and I think most people will use these editors in conjunction with iPhoto or even Aperture or Lightroom, using them to do tasks that involve layers and selections and pixel-level operations, features which iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom don't provide.

Welcome to another wave of bug fixes and improvements to your favorite image editor. With v1.1.3, we mostly worked on Move, Zoom, Hand and Crop tools, performance, and (again) stability improvements. Check the release notes for more info.

Considering the price (though I'll admit, I got it as this year's MacHeist bundle), how nice the application is already and how fast they are to respond to bug reports, this application is definitely worth it.

As I'm sure you know by now, Aperture 2 shipped today. I'm playing with the trial right now, and it appears to be quite impressive. I have a few thoughts already:

The speed argument is over. Perhaps, though, I should say that it has just begun. Nobody argued that Aperture 1.5 struggled for performance whilst Lightroom does not. Aperture 2 certainly now appears to bear serious comparison with Lightroom 1.3 on performance.

...

There’s an image adjustment API in Aperture 2. If someone can persuade Imagenomics to port Noiseware Pro to Aperture, I will be a very, very happy man.

The API is huge. It would be pretty sweet if pixelmator could hook into this.

As the MacHeist 2 software scavenger hunt winds down this weekend, the release of the MH software bundle for full-fare paying customers is just around the corner. TUAW has learned that the contents of the bundle will be announced next week on January 9th, and pricing will be the same as last year ($49). As usual, MacHeist donates 25% of the purchase prices of the bundles to charity.

...

One thing that we are told will definitely be in the bundle is Pixelmator, so you'll be looking at a bargain on the basis of one $59 app by itself.

I was just remarking to Allie last night (since I've got her doing the MacHeist thing now, too) that Pixelmator would probably be the "big application" that tops off MacHeist this year, much like TextMate was last year.