Flying Meat
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Acorn 4.0 arrives with much faster performance, curves and more
Flying Meat has updated Acorn, its popular image-editing software for Mac, to version 4, bringing a plenitude of new features and performance enhancements. Most notably, Acorn 4 is dramatically faster than previous versions as well as introduces the following new features: curves, non-destructive filters, multiple layer selection, Boolean shape operations, Merlin HUD, new shape tools and an improved UI. Full release notes can be found on Flying Meat's Acorn website. Acorn 4 requires Mac OS X 10.8 and is available at a special introductory price of US$29.99 through to the end of May at Flying Meat's Acorn website. If you've not tried Acorn before, you can do so as a free trial for 14 days.
Acorn updated to version 3.5, lots of new options and tools
Photo-editing app Acorn has been updated to version 3.5, and with that update comes plenty of new features to check out. The Magic Wand tool has been updated with the ability to do contiguous or non-contiguous selections, you can now export just a single layer out of the app, there are some new plugin APIs to use and there are of course a whole host of other updates and bugfixes, all available on the official website. In short, a great app has been made even better. You can nab Acorn over on the Mac App Store -- it's US$49.99. If you already own the app, the update is free.
VoodooPad 5: wiki magic
For those of us who nerd out about things like desktop wikis, VoodooPad 5 (from the creator of Acorn) is an exciting release. It brings new capabilities so powerful that they should come with a "for good, not evil" warning. If you're not familiar with VoodooPad, it's a desktop wiki with media embedding capabilities, a scriptable interface and a lot of power under the hood. Whether you want to use it for note-taking, project management or even maintaining documentation and live websites, it's a powerhouse. We may have mentioned it once or twice before. What's so great about version 5? First, Dropbox sync is greatly improved. You can even share docs with multiple people and see who edited what, when. For those of us of the Markdown persuasion, there's a new page type specifically for Markdown, with editing features and syntax highlighting. If you build large documents -- say, a documentation project for your software -- you can publish the entire document as a PDF or ePub book. There's a new feature called "Collections" that lets you create tables of contents and determine page order, which makes the export features much more useful for more linear output formats. We've always been able to do fun things like write event scripts that search for certain @tags and compile them, but the new To-Dos palette offers a faster, customizable solution for this. There are more flexible event scripts, new scripting language support (including the ability to write scripts in JavaScript). There are even "scriptlets," your own small scripts that can be embedded directly within a page. There's plenty more, as you can see in the release notes. VoodooPad 5 is available in the Mac App Store for US$24.99 (limited time price), or directly from Flying Meat's store (same price).
Acorn 3 released, adds quick masks, layer styles and more
Flying Meat introduced version 3 of its popular Acorn image editor today, adding a number of features, including layer styles, text and live multistop gradients, rotating text and shapes, quick mask, instant alpha channels, new filters, improvements to PSD importing as well as adding PSD exporting and more. Full release notes can be found on Acorn's website. Acorn 3 requires OS X 10.6 or later and is available for trial/purchase through its website or on the Mac App Store for US$29.99 for the next week -- it will then return to $49.95. Users upgrading from Acorn 2 can do so for $19.99. We're planning an in-depth review of Acorn 3 for later this week to take a look at all the new features. So stay tuned for that!
Voodoo Pad 4.1 adds iPhone client
VoodooPad (which we've covered many times) is a bit of a different take on the classic snippet / information manager app, allowing you to create a personal wiki with entries for whatever you might like to keep track of. With the recently released version 4.1 Gus Mueller has added an option to export documents to his new, free iPhone client (iTunes link) for access to your wikis on the go. Like most iPhone / iPod touch syncing solutions, this works over WiFi on the same network as your Mac. This is in addition to the previously offered WebDAV syncing and iPhone optimized pages. VoodooPad comes in three versions: a free lite version, a $29.95 regular version, and a $49.95 Pro version that adds a few features, including a built-in webserver; demos are also available. The iPhone / iPod touch client is a free download from iTunes. [via Infinite Loop]
VoodooPad 4.0 provides WebDAV sync
VoodooPad got a major upgrade today; after an intense beta period, version 4.0 is live. For those of you not familiar, VoodooPad is a personal wiki, a brainstorming and note-taking tool and the ultimate "geek's notebook" (my term, not theirs). With the ability to import a variety of files and link others, it also makes a great project management hub. I use it in combination with one of my other previously-mentioned favorites, Curio. It's had a fair number of mentions here in the past, and the 4.0 update is certainly something to talk about. Among the new features is the ability to sync using WebDAV. You can sync pages or entire documents in both directions, allowing for collaboration or just providing the ability to work on multiple machines. There are instructions available for setup on the Flying Meat wiki. I've been testing the sync feature for a while, and it works superbly. The web-publishing capabilities have been expanded, including iPhone-optimized output. There's also a new feature called "The Bucket" for gathering text -- via a system-wide hotkey -- from any application. PDF output, faster speeds, and a new layout for palette windows all add up to a great release. Organizing notes and files is simple, and linking together pertinent pages, snippets, Address Book contacts and more is a breeze. For those of a scripting persuasion, the reason I call it the "geek's notebook" is VoodooPad's ability to execute pages as scripts (Python ... Lua is being deprecated), and also the ability to extend via a plugin API. This can be used to work in HTML, Markdown and Textile support, set up GTD systems, even publish a blog. VoodooPad 4 is going for $29.95USD, and version 3 users can upgrade for $14.95USD. The Pro version is $49.95USD, upgrade for $19.95USD. There are free demos of each on their respective pages, and there's also a "Lite" version available for free, no strings attached. VoodooPad customers who purchased version 3 after August 1st, 2008 get a free upgrade. Check the full release notes for version 4 (and prior releases), as well as the features page for more information on VoodooPad and the 4.0 update.
Acorn 1.2
Acorn, Flying Meat's easy to use image editor, was updated to version 1.2 over the weekend. Acorn is the perfect image editor for me: it is easy to use, quick to launch, and it tries to guess what I want to do with an image and does it for me (that's what I call service!).New in version 1.2 are: "Last filter" command for applying the same filter over and over again support for JPEG 2000 images (they are like JPEGs only 2000 times better) smarter Trim command makes trimming even easier a host of bug fixes, UI refinements, and small features all listed here Acorn requires OS X 10.4.9 or higher, and costs $49.95. 1.2 is a free upgrade for registered users.
TUAW Interview: Gus Mueller on Acorn
As we mentioned yesterday, Gus Mueller and Flying Meat software just released Acorn, a new, relatively low-cost image editor for the Mac. We've interviewed Gus before with interesting results, so last evening we again (virtually) sat down with Gus to ask him a few questions about Acorn itself, the development process, his company, and a little of what the future holds.
TUAW Interview series with Gus Mueller: The Leopard delay - does it change anything?
The interview train just keeps on chuggin', and this time we have Gus Mueller of Flying Meat Software, developer of VoodooPad, FlySketch and FlyGesture, on board. Just like the other interviews I've done with Brent Simmons, Wil Shipley and Paul Kafasis, Gus had some great thoughts to share on the Leopard delay, whether to develop software for one specific OS, words of wisdom from a Nintendo game developer and how Apple's past behavior can hint at the possibility of the iPhone opening up up to 3rd parties sometime in the future. Amazing fact from this particular interview: Gus's mobile phone just turned 7.Read on for my interview with Gus Mueller.
VoodooPad 3.0 - Serious Mojo
Oh so sweet. My favorite catch-all notepad and organizer, VoodooPad, has been updated to version 3.0 today. I fell in love with VoodooPad about two years ago when I started a new job and needed to start keeping track of a huge variety of different kinds of information. I started dumping everything I could into the program--scraps of technical support information, dates and details of computer repairs, website URL's, coworkers' phone extensions, serial numbers. I didn't really know right away if VoodooPad was going to help keep all this stuff organized, but after awhile I noticed that I started to rely on the software to track down that information that otherwise would have been misplaced. I also started to notice connections between information that I might not have otherwise made.VoodooPad sports a number of new features including tabs, searching improvements, support for big documents, and new filetype embedding. There's also support for Mac OS X's PDF framework so you can print a PDF straight into VoodooPad.VoodooPad Pro is a new edition to the family that has several advanced options for power-users such as encryption, triggers, metadata inclusion, and a built-in web server to facilitate collaboration between VoodooPad users.Other programs, like Yojimbo, have popped up recently to serve as the same kind of catch-all, but I remain faithful to VoodooPad, my first love. It saved me from the growing rat's nest that was StickyBrain. Mojo, indeed.
Flying Meat apps all Universal
Flying Meat, the makers of VoodooPad, FlySketch, and FlyGesture, has announced that all their apps are Universal. I find it very heartening that all these small, independent Mac developers are so quick to jump onto the Intel bandwagon. Sure, it makes good business sense, but it is also a vote of confidence for the new Intel Macs.I'm sure we will be seeing more and more announcements just like this one, and perhaps from some large companies as well!
