Acorn: Simple Image Editing

September 10th, 2007

I confess, I was playing along when I linked to Gus Mueller’s interview with himself, foretelling the release today of his latest product, Flying Meat’s Acorn image editing application.

What is Acorn? Gus describes it as “Simple Image Editing,” but I prefer to call it “the keep me from launching Photoshop tool.”

I’ve been lucky to beta test Acorn for the past several months, and as long as I’ve been using it, it’s where I go first when I say it’s “time for Photoshop.” I can accomplish a lot of my goals with the simple editing tools combined with layer support and a bevy of fancy transformation filters.

The worst thing you can say about Acorn is that it’s “missing such and such.” Of course it is. It’s a 1.0 release. But the fact that it’s cool enough to make you desperately want “such and such” means it’s going to be an exciting road ahead for this little app.

Congratulations, Gus. It’s been a long road but you’ve reached 1.0 with panache!