Flying Meat Software has released a new program called Acorn that is a great little image editor program.

It's still 1.0, so it's not perfect, but it's damn nice. I played around for like 10 seconds, and decided that it basically did everything that I ever did with photoshop, ever. Everything. And it's easier to use. How cool is that.

This provoked me to say a few things in a chat with a friend that I thought would be good to log here:

  • The one thing that big conventional image editing and design suits have that I don't think is replicated well in this space is proper layout tools. Still have to go to adobe or quark for layout.
  • The photoshop interface is really out dated an inefficient, and almost works better on windows, because the "window as container metaphor" is helpful in unifying everything.
  • Photoshop is bloated as hell, because adobe seems more concerned with maintaining backwards compatibility than actually moving forward in terms of features or actual performance. I think Microsoft did the right thing by releasing a document converter, when they changed their formats, and I think this is probably the best way to deal the compatibility issues (well other than using really good open formats, but realistically even good open formats change).