Linked List: April 10, 2021

Saturday, 10 April 2021

Acorn 7.0 

Beautiful update to my favorite image editor. Big new features include:

  • A unified document window, where the tools (which used to be in floating palettes) are built right into the document window itself. (There’s also a preference setting if you still want them as palettes.)
  • Native Apple Silicon code.
  • A new “Command Bar”, that is sort of like Spotlight but just for Acorn. You pop up the Command Bar with Shift-Command-O and type what you’re looking for — you get instant results for Acorn commands and Acorn’s excellent Help documentation. (BBEdit and Nova both have features similar to this; it’s a great way to expose a deep professional app’s many commands to the keyboard without asking the user to memorize dozens of distinct shortcuts.)

See also: Acorn author Gus Mueller’s write-up on his blog, and the copiously-detailed Acorn release notes.

Acorn is usually $40, but is currently on sale for just $20 — a veritable steal for a pro tool like this — at Flying Meat’s website and on the Mac App Store. 14-day free trial, too.