The July meeting was held on Friday the 13th. Robert gave us a demonstration of Acorn 6, an inexpensive photo and image editor for the Mac. During our news discussion we reminisced about 10 years of the iOS App Store.
Acorn 6
Our main feature was a demonstration of Acorn 6, an inexpensive image editor that’s available from the Mac App Store and the developer’s web site (where you can also get a 14 day free trial).
Robert showed us how Acorn offers more extensive image editing features than Photos or Preview included with the Mac. This includes the ability to work on selected areas of an image and combine images, text and shapes on separate fully editable layers. He showed off some of the powerful filters that can be used to add effects to layers and how these can be combined, reordered and edited at any time to get just the right result.
Some other handy features Robert mentioned included various vector drawing tools, web export (which allows you to see quality and file size changes before you save) and support for a wide range of file formats including PSD (used by Photoshop).
Acorn has a good set of documentation and tutorials if you’re interested in trying it out.
News
We chatted about the month’s Apple news including:
- The iOS App Store celebrates its 10th Anniversary. 9 to 5 Mac has an interesting article showing the design evolution of 10 long-running iOS apps.
- Apple is rebuilding Maps based on their own data.
- iOS 11.4.1 introduces USB restricted mode to enhance security.
- A service programme for MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards is now available from Apple.
- Apple is ending the availability of its print products (photo books, calendars etc.) on September 30th. However you will still be able to order print products from Photos via various third party services.