Flying Meat: Acorn 1.0

Brand-new $40 image-editing app from Flying Meat’s Gus Mueller. Highlights include terrific layer support, tablet support for pressure strokes, GPU-powered for performance, vector shapes and text layers, full-screen mode, Photoshop-style single-character tool selection shortcuts, and a plugin API that not only supports compiled Objective-C extensions, but also single-file scripts written in Python.

What sets Acorn apart, though, is the simplicity of the UI. Acorn’s main ploy in this regard is that rather than spewing multiple palettes across your display, it shows just one, which changes contextually based on the tool you’re using. I’ve been beta-testing Acorn for months, and it’s sweet.

★ Monday, 10 September 2007