AAUG Reviews

by Zachary Zaletel, AAUG Member

Flying Meat, makers of the new layer-based image editing program for OSX, bill Acorn as ’simple & easy… built for the 21st century’. Acorn is one of the new breed of graphic manipulation programs to come out for OSX recently, and does its makes use of the Core Image library built into OSX, which should speed up many daily operations. So how is it?

When you open Acorn, you’re presented with the option to ‘create a new image’ or ‘open an existing image’. One nice little detail - if you have an image sitting on your clipboard, Acorn is aware of it and provides the option to ‘create a new image from clipboard’. Handy, that! Another handy little detail I noticed as I was writing this review - you can drag and drop an app icon from the finder into an image window and have it to use in a new layer, just like that.

The main palette in Acorn provides all of the standard tools for moving, selecting, manipulating, erasing, filling, adding text, etc that you would expect. Their effort to keep the interface simple works well, it is clean and uncluttered and makes for quick navigation. Flying Meat have also paid attention to the details and made extensive use of the keyboard to allow for efficient navigation through those tools.

The actual image editing window doesn’t provide a lot to comment on, other than the fact that canvas size and zooming info is provided at the bottom. (more…)