Acorn 5
Big upgrade to my favorite image editor:
Shape Processors are filters for shape layers, which will move and tweak and generate and adjust shapes for you. And best of all, they are non-destructive and stackable (just like Acorn’s filters).
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This is a lot more snapping going on now. Snap to Grid, guides, shapes in layers, other layers, selections, canvas bounds, etc.
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Levels and Curves joins all the other non destructive filters—this is pretty awesome. You can use Levels and Curves on shape layers, even combine in the same filters list, tweaking both at the same time, and add a Curves filter multiple times to the same image.
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We fixed hundreds of minor bugs. Bugs that built up over the years that very few people ever encountered, like “the shortcut key for zooming in doesn’t work when the keyboard layout is set to Dvorak - Qwerty ⌘”. So we fixed pretty much all of those. It took months and months of work, it was super boring and mind numbing and it was really hard to justify, and it made Acorn 5 super late. But we did it anyway, because something in us felt that software quality has been going downhill in general, and we sure as heck weren’t going to let that happen to Acorn. So we took a long break from adding features and just fixed stuff.
And if you reported one of these bugs that was fixed in Acorn 5 and we haven’t already sent you a license—let us know and we’ll make you one. (See, another good reason to report any bugs you find—free stuff!).
But wait - Acorn already has Curves and Levels, right? Yes, but in Acorn 5 they are baked into the existing filter chain. So now you can add Levels to your Curves and then a blur and then why not add Curves again after that and finish with a Drop Shadow filter? Then save the file and open it up again and remove the second Curves because that’s just too much what were you thinking? And then you realize Curves and Levels are now non-destructive and that’s amazing.
I like the way the documentation is done, e.g. Shape Processor, Levels, Curves.
There’s no upgrade pricing, presumably because of the Mac App Store:
For a limited time (until the end of September, 2015) we are offering Acorn at a sweet discount price of $24.99. This discount is available to both new users and previous users of Acorn. When October rolls around Acorn will bump its price up again.
