Lost in my FM 20th Anniversary post, was any mention of a new version of Acorn. But the day Flying Meat turned 20, I also released Acorn 7.2, which includes support for Shortcuts and some other new features.

But behold - now you can use the power of Shortcuts on MacOS 12 to automate Acorn into cropping, flipping, resizing, rotating, enhancing, trimming, and applying filter presets to your images. And I'm not going to stop there. I have more ideas in mind, but I'd also love to hear if you have any requests. So send them to support@flyingmeat.com if you do.

Acorn has had 10+ years of AppleScript, JavaScript, and Automator support built into it. And now with the new Shortcut actions you'll find yourself with another great option for automating or scripting tasks in Acorn.

What else is new in Acorn 7.2? Text boxes have three new alignment options: top, middle, and bottom. This is awesome for those pesky layouts you're trying to get just right (or maybe you've got placeholder text which will be scripted out using the AppleScript "replace text" command (and similar API in JavaScript)).

There's a new "Auto Enhance" filter (to go along with the Shortcut action), a "Matte" filter to give a colored background to transparent layers / images, and a new option for the Histogram filter: "High fidelity". This will use a slower, but more accurate method of sampling your images for the histogram. This is awesome if you have a pretty noisy image and want to make sure the histogram you're looking at is 100% accurate.

For exporting, there is a new option in Layer Export where you can crop a layer's bounds to the canvas size. I've also added a "Lossless" option when exporting images as WebP.

And for the last of this short list, there are new Command Bar actions: "New Image From Selected Layers" and "Delete Hidden Layers".

The whole list, including a new AppleScript command and other QOL improvements can be found in Acorn's release notes.