A feature that's been asked for in Acorn, for probably over a decade now, is the ability to scrub zoom. This is where you can click and drag left or right with the zoom tool selected, and your image is zoomed in or out. It's a great feature and I'm happy to say that I've recently added it for the upcoming release of Acorn 8.1. And you can try it out right now if you'd like, by downloading a preview release of Acorn 8.1 from the latest builds page.
There are two ways to toggle this behavior.
Via the Zoom palette: Use the “Scrub zoom” checkbox located right above the image histogram in the zoom palette (see the image to the right).
With a keyboard shortcut: This is for my friends who like to keep their fingers on the keyboard. You can press the ‘z’ key twice in quick succession to toggle the preference on and off.
And while I was diving into Acorn's zoom code, I cleaned up a few things and increased the maximum zoom level to 25,600%, more than double the previous limit.
And here’s a quick tip: Did you know that, in addition to pressing ⌘1 to zoom your image to 100%, you can also double-click the zoom slider handle to achieve the same effect?
You can download a preview of Acorn 8.1 from the latest builds page.