acorn. noun.
1. the fruit of the oak, a smooth oval nut in a rough cup-like base.
2. the easiest to use, full-featured image editor — available only for the Mac.
Acorn is a new-comer to the image editing apps for the Mac market — and an exceptional one, at that. In fact, it was so surprising to me that I thought it merited its own entry in my Mac dictionary. Keep on reading to learn what makes Acorn better than your average tree nut.
Design. When you open it for the first time, at a quick glance you’ll see nothing that separates it from most image editors out there: you have the image window, the drop-down menus, and the tools palette. But as you take a second look at it, you’ll notice that everything has been designed to be effectively used in the best and easiest manner possible. It’s a breeze to work your way through the app.
Functionality. It has just about anything the user could want from their image editing app: everything from filters, image resizing to the useful magic wand — they’re all here and accounted for. And thanks to how they’ve been implemented, applying all these tools to good use is easy enough to provide remarkable results in little time. Something that’s interesting to notice is that Acorn takes advantage of your Mac’s GPU, so it’ll lift a lot of work off the processor, thus improving overall efficiency. And yes, Acorn works perfectly with Wacom tablets.
Limitations. It’s greatest strength — the tools palette — can also be a big weakness if by now you’re a seasoned Photoshop user. Navigating through it just seems kind of awkward when you’ve been using Photoshop for too long. But it’s worthwhile to notice that Photoshop is still built mostly for pros, whereas Acorn is built for everyone. Oh, and be careful with those CMYK images, because they don’t play well in some aspects with this app.
Final thoughts. This is the kind of app that the Mac market had been waiting for — most of the power tools one could expect from Photoshop have been crammed into one friendly package. And at its $39.95 introductory price, this is one deal no one should miss. Acorn is the perfect example of how Mac apps are differentiating themselves from others: greatly designed, oozing with functionality, and easy to use. In a few words, Acorn is superb.
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[tags]Apple,Mac,Software,Acorn[/tags]
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