Acorn

What do you like best?

Acorn is a stand-out product I recommend all the time, to anyone who needs to do simple illustration or photo editing on the Mac. It's my go-to image editor, one of only four apps that sits in the toolbar of my Finder.

Whilst it renders to bitmap images, Acorn's internal format allows you to preserve vector layers of shapes and text over the top. So it's a replacement for simple vector editors - I reach for it ahead of Sketch.

As a technical achievement, it's very impressive (speaking as a dev with 40 years experience). The Acorn filters and operations are blindingly fast. Often, you forget it's doing something complicated because the experience is so smooth.

I'm someone who has to dive into using a tool suddenly then often doesn't get back to it for weeks. Acorn's highly usable and intuitable interface makes this easy.

What do you dislike?

I struggle to find fault as it's such a thoughtfully polished product. The only complaint I'd have is that their App Store strategy is to release new versions with a limited time 50% upgrade. I'm pretty sure this is an Apple limit that they cannot offer a discounted upgrade directly to users of previous versions.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I use it for image editing, simple fixups, logo bitmap editor, and minor page layout with text and shapes.