Acorn 8.6
- A new brushing engine that has been rewritten using Metal shaders. It includes an option for “velocity thinning”, where the faster you draw your brush strokes, the thinner the lines.
- A new
acornshell tool that you can use to send JavaScript to Acorn, as well as start an MCP server. So if you’ve got a favorite LLM you like to use, you can now use it to drive Acorn. The JavaScript section of the release notes are a good read if you’re interested in that. In addition:
- The JS API has also been updated with examples for most calls.
- The shell tool has a
-jsioargument which lets you do things like:echo "acorn.takeLayeredScreenshot();" | acorn -jsio- Big ML models (used for Select Subject and Super Resolution Scaling) are now downloaded on demand. If AI isn’t your thing, they won’t take up any space on your Mac.
I feel lucky that Acorn is enough for me.
Very few software companies outside of Microsoft have the kind of leverage over entire industries. Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom and After Effects are all load bearing to some extent within their respective fields despite the fact that many people I know loathe using them.
Via Nick Heer:
I have said it before and I will say it again: if I had known the path Adobe’s software would eventually go down, I might very well have picked a different career.
Previously:
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Photoshop CS3 came out in 2007, and its messy installation process was already a clear sign of things to come. I vividly remember double-clicking the installer and thinking it had to be a mistake. What popped up were folders named Bootstrap and Payloads, along with an app named Setup. Someone thought it was a good idea to ship it like that.
Agreed, 19 years ago might have still been too late for a career change and depending on one’s clients, you really become locked in with the Adobe file formats.
But besides that point. Setup.app! On a Mac!
It’s a good thing, though, because the more Adobe and Apple turn into boring giants, trampling the flowers in their clumsiness, the more interesting jewels like Acorn become.
