Acorn 8.5
There’s a new “Bendable” type of Arrow shape which lets you add a nice adjustable curve to your arrow. You can also have arrow heads on either end (or both) of the shape.
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SVG importing has been much improved. Drop shadows, text on a path, poly lines, transforms, reading css colors, and more are all now supported.
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Also new: pressing the option-tab keys will hide all palettes and toolbars. It’s a little thing, but I really like being able to see my image without any distractions.
Previously:
Update (2026-04-30): Gus Mueller (Mastodon):
With the release of Acorn 8 last December, I published “ACTN002 Acorn’s Native File Format” as part of the documentation updates, which is exactly what it sounds like.
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This file format has worked well in Acorn for 16 years now, and I plan on keeping it the same moving forward.
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When Acorn’s dev started talking about using AI to code Acorn, they became dead to me. AI is horrible for the environment and based on an extreme amount of piracy. I don’t want to support that
@Manx: I have some bad news for you about the dev teams who create practically every single piece of software you use and support…
@Gord L and I have bad news for you, if you believe that "practically" every dev team out there uses AI now.
Many dev teams are, yes. And many have tried it and discovered that AI development isn't all that it's cracked up to be. One of my clients just walked away from AI because the spend on tokens + the lackluster quality of the code it spat out was far more expensive than just paying for good devs. Other companies are slowly learning this, too.
And even if what you say were true, that doesn't mean @Manx is wrong to be concerned about the ethics around AI. And they absolutely should let developers know that it's a problem.
People can make whatever decisions they want on whatever moral objections they choose, but I think rejecting any software that has had any amount of LLM usage in its creation is an odd stance to take.
LLMs are a technology. Like any other technology, using LLMs incurs a cost and can create a benefit. If the benefit of using an LLM outweighs its cost, then it makes sense to use LLMs.
One clear example of where this are PR reviews. I run all of my PRs through an LLM, and almost every time, the LLM finds something to improve. Sometimes, it's a small thing, like a poorly named function. But other times, it found logical errors that would have caused bugs, and a few times, it found security issues that I missed.
The cost of running this PR review in terms of electricity and water usage is a rounding error compared to the cost of my writing the code in the first place.
People can make whatever decisions they want, but it's no longer a question of whether LLMs are helpful for making software; they are. As a consequence, most developers use them. In surveys, the share of professional developers using LLMs with some frequency consistently pegs at around 80%.
If you absolutely hate LLMs, I guess it still makes sense to try to punish devs who openly talk about how they use LLMs in order to disincentivize LLM usage more broadly, but it's not going to work, and it's not going to prevent you from running software that was made with the help of LLMs. It's just going to stop devs from talking about it publicly.
