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.

There’s a growing wish in the web designer community to get rid of Adobe products and find some kind of Photoshop / Fireworks / Illustrator replacement. Why replace Adobe with something else? Well everyone knows the answer to that: Adobe products are bloated and big. They have too many features that no one cares about. They make your computer crash.

Are there any alternatives right now? Well. Yes and No.

For the Mac there are a few names being mentioned. Acorn, Pixelmator and Opacity.

Of these I’ve used Pixelmator and Acorn.

Pixelmator seems to be the one that’s pretty much ahead in the game. But the last version of Pixelmator seemed to me to export bad quality images for web. And it has this annoying bug that messes up layers’ positions when you do Crop, Save Image, and then go back to the original image.

That’s the thing that’s annoying. Pixelmator could have gotten it right almost a year ago, but they don’t focus enough on what web designers need. Their aim seems to be too broad. It’s an almighty “image editor” —which is just what made Photoshop a piece of shit.

I’ve only been using Acorn for a week and I’m really liking it. It draws vector shapes with pixel precision, has optional stroke and curved corners. It’s lightweight and super fast. One major problem is that it flattens PSD files when it opens them. (Pixelmator is way ahead in that area).

The great thing about Acorn is that Flying Meat, the developer, seems to be focusing on getting the web designer community the tool they need. I’m praying that they make it.

The problem I’m facing? When you work with a team it would take one hell of an app to make people ditch their favorite tools. I’m sure this is a problem for a lot of people too.

So let’s wait and see who wins. I’m sure that whomever can deliver an app that can replace Adobe Fireworks will end up making millions of bucks. I just want to be happy making sites.

Further reading:

• Mucking up the Fireworks (Jason Santamaria, 2008)
• An open letter to software developers (Nathan Pitman, 2009)
• A big-assed post about Fireworks (Jon Hicks, 2009)