It's time for another progress report.

Acorn Stuff
Acorn 4.4 betas are up. Not too much in the way of hot new features, but there's some good changes and fixes in there. Live updating of blend modes as you scroll through the list is awesome, and the same trick now works with the font popup for text. It's now super easy to quickly preview what new fonts would look like with your text.

I expect to ship this version soon, so make sure to write us (support@flyingmeat.com) if you find anything wrong.

I've also been working on a new compositing engine for Acorn. I was originally going to ship it in 4.4 but it still has some kinks in it to work out so it's going to wait until 4.5 or maybe later. It's showing lots of promise though. If you have lots of layer styles and/or layers, drawing is crazy faster. The basic trick behind the new code is to do some pretty aggressive caching. However, I might have pushed things to be a little too aggressive.

Project Oak now stands at 35% complete. This is lower than the last time I gave an update. Why's that? I've filed a bunch of bugs against the new compositing engine but Acorn has also gotten an influx of new users thanks to the recent sale (see below), and along with that are a lot more eyeballs scrutinizing Acorn. And combining that with the amount of time I've had to take off when moving - well, it was bound to slip backwards at some point.

Flying Meat's 11 1/2 Anniversary Sale
A month or so ago we put Acorn on sale for $14.99 in celebration of FM being around for over 4197 days. The super sale is over now though, but if you were signed up for our newsletter you would have known right away!

My original plan was to sell it at this price for two days. Kirstin convinced me to push it out 14 days instead, to give people more time to try it. So that's what we did. Acorn is still on sale right now, down to $29.99 from $49.99, which is our normal upgrade price. I'm not sure how long I'll keep it at this price, but it's sticking there for now.

WWDC is coming
Are you going to be in SF for Apple's annual developer conference? So am I! If you see me, make sure to say hi. And free FM stickers for anyone sporting a Flying Meat t-shirt.

Hello again from Mukilteo, WA
We're done moving and the old house sold. Most everything is unpacked but we still have lots of work to do. It stalled work a bit, but that was expected. Onward.