Things We Like — Addendum: Acorn 4
Ben
Gus and Kirstin, over at Flying Meat, just released Acorn 4, which I used to refer to as a “lightweight image editor.” Had it been released a few days earlier, it would have definitely made our recent Things We Like post. That said, you can’t really call Acorn a lightweight editor any more. Straightforward and powerful is more like it.
We use Acorn a lot when developing apps. It’s a really great tool for post-processing an asset once we pull it out of a gargantuan mock-up PSD and want to down-sample it, prepare it to be stretchable or create variations on it. It’s also really nice for quick repetitive tasks. For instance, we used it a ton for compositing App Store screenshots (Ita has 25 separate screenshot assets1 for each supported language2) until we found an app that automatically adds perfect status bars to our screenshots (Status Magic, which we’ll talk about at excruciating length some other time).
Gus has a nice intro video for one of the headlining features, Layer Styles and Filters, which are now completely non-destructive, directly editable on the canvas and super great.
Go get it now — on sale for $29.99 for the month of May. Sweet!