The Forgotten Artist
The Macintosh has always been the platform of choice for graphic designers and artists. There are Mac programs available for page layout, photograph manipulation, vector art, animation, and nearly any application of the graphic arts imaginable. There is, however, one sort of artist who has a very tough time with the current tools available for what we can all agree is the superior platform.
This artist is the pixel-pusher. His arcane art is as ancient as the Atari and as important as any other discipline; why, then, are there so few programs for the Macintosh that support him?
We can't say that we know why-doubtless, something about this "3D" fad. But as pixel art comes once again to the forefront of the video game arts, the spriter will have reason to turn to the Macintosh. This reason is Pixen 2.
The Superior Program
Pixen is the best program for the pixel artist using Mac OS X. There is no competition, not even from the huge companies with several-hundred-dollar software suites. Their applications are inferior for pixel art, by virtue of their being conceived with a completely different intent. Pixen is specifically for small-scale or pixel art; it shines better there than any other application. Not only that, but Pixen carries no price tag: it's open source under the MIT license and absolutely free.
Pixen has more unique and powerful features for pixel art than any other program, including some features that are exclusive to Pixen and have never been in any other graphics program. The majority of these most interesting features have come as direct requests from our users, professional and amateur pixel artists who, like us, see Pixen as a tool built for the artist-not for a marketing department.
Welcome to Pixen 2
Pixen 2 is leagues ahead of any previous release of Pixen in terms of reliability, speed, power, appearance, and every other metric. See the changes between this release of Pixen and r1v12.
Of course, the best way to decide how useful Pixen is for your work is to download it. It's free, but if you'd rather see Pixen before downloading it, screenshots are available.
Also, if you're a programmer, feel free to poke around in our code an reuse it in your own projects. As we said before, it's under the MIT license, so you can do whatever you want with it (commercial stuff too), as long as you keep the copyright.
http://www.opensword.org/Pixen/
