The Shape of Everything
A website mostly about Mac stuff, written by August "Gus" Mueller
» Acorn
» Retrobatch
» Mastodon
» Micro.blog
» Instagram
» Github
» Maybe Pizza?
» Archives
» Feed
» Micro feed
September 25, 2023

Acorn 7.4.3 is out, and it's a free update for anyone with an Acorn 7 license.

This release is mostly about bug fixes, but I snuck in a couple of little things, one of which has been asked for a bunch of times over the years: the ability to know the number of pixels you've got in a selection. The count shows up in the Selection palette right below the width and height fields.

There's also a new "New Auto Level / Straighten" command, layered screenshot improvements, and a couple more things. You can read the gory details in the full release notes.

One more super geeky thing I've added is a JavaScript Console:

This tool is really meant for folks developing plugins in Acorn, and it is only accessible from the Command Bar, but a part of me absolutely loves pointing out little things like this. I was just chatting with Brent Simmons the other day at Xcoders how you can't really spelunk in apps any more because of all the restrictions that are (justifiably) put on recent MacOS releases. While a console isn't exactly a spelunking tool, I still think it's kind of cool and fun and maybe someone will discover it accidently and that will inspire them to do stupid and entertaining things like we used to do back in the 10.x days.

Anyway, here's a picture of some groovy flowers out of the 1970s, because I'm still stuck on the ’74 theme for recent Acorn releases.