Gaston Garcia

I’ve been integrating Acorn into my work-flow for about two months now. (Acorn is an image editor of OS X —an alternative to Photoshop or Fireworks). I’ve been using it for cropping images, creating transparent pngs, optimizing jpgs and basically any “small” task that would require me to open up the gigantic monster called Photoshop. (And we all know that just launching Photoshop means the task is not “small” anymore).

So here’s something that has had me in awe for a few weeks. When in Acorn you select Command-Shift-T, to transform an image, the default behavior of Acorn is to “Constrain Proportions”. Instead of holding the Shift key, which is what you have to do in Photoshop/Fireworks/Pixelmator/etc, you can just transform the image to it’s desired size.

I love this! I mean honestly, when was the last time you had to transform an image without holding the shift key? I bet you haven’t done that in years! Making it the default behavior seems to me a “small” detail that shows how smart new software can be. It just takes a developer that can forget the competition and observe what’s really needed.

I’ve probably wasted years of my life pressing that damned Shift key.

Note: I’m using the 2.2 Beta versions of Acorn. You can get it here.