Acorn 4 is out, and I'm slightly proud of this bit of code.

A brand new UI, non destructive filters and layer styles merged together in one great bag of awesome, curves, much improved vector tools, and speed. And that's just some of the big stuff. There's a ton of little things which when added all together make Acorn feel and work better than it ever has.

Do me a favor- if you've written Acorn off in the past, give version 4.0 a try. You just might be pleasantly surprised. And if you've been using Acorn for years, I think you're really going to love what we've done with it.

For the month of May, we're offering upgrade pricing on Acorn 4 to everyone- $29.99. If you'd like to move from the Mac App Store to the direct version of Acorn, or the other way around - you can do so without having to repurchase Acorn all over again. At the end of May, we'll be raising the price back to normal levels.

And finally, for fun, here's a little video I whipped up of the new filter UI in action:

Acorn 3.5.1 is out for both direct and App Store customers.

There's nothing huge in this update, just some good old fashoned bug fixes for everyone. We'll have the more amazing stuff later ready for you sometime later.

If you've purchased Acorn via the Mac App Store, we'd love it if you could leave a review for the latest release while you're waiting for it to download.

Pixa is a handy app to organize your images, and the latest update just added support for Acorn. I've been using it quite a bit - it's a great little app that just got better.

And just like that, Acorn 3.5 was released on the App Store, hurray!

We just pushed up Acorn 3.5 for our direct customers. The big focus for the release was bug fixes, but we managed to slip in some new features as well. A new non-contiguous option for the magic wand tool, File ▸ Layer Export, new layer blend modes (Divide, Lighter Color, Darker Color, Hard Mix, and Subtract ), and a new filter for making fancy sunbursts.

There were a handful of changes, as well as new APIs for scripters. Visit the release notes for the full details.

VoodooPad 5.1.1 was finally cleared for sale on the App Store, hurray! (Yes, we skipped 5.1. But 5.1.1 is obviously better anyway, because it has an extra 1 on the end. And more is always better).

We've also submitted VPiOS 2.0.3, which has support for the new 4" iPhone as well as some bug fixes and the ability to set Markdown as your default new page type.

We recently release VoodooPad 5.1, which has some neat new features including Static, a Markdown weblog generation tool. And earlier this week we also released VoodooPad 5.1.1 which has some important bug fixes in it.

If you've bought VoodooPad directly from us, you can use the VoodooPad ▸ Check for Updates… menu item to grab the latest version.

Unfortunately these updates have not made their way through the App Store yet. We submitted VoodooPad 5.1 on August 27th, and it was rejected last Friday for some sandboxing issues, so we took the opportunity to resubmit it as 5.1.1. We're hoping all issues will be resolved with the new update, so at the current rate of app approvals, it should be out sometime in the next two to three weeks.

Thanks for your patience.

We've added new Acorn documention for you: Using Automator to re-compress a folder full of JPEG files for the Web.

Using Acorn and Automator together is always a powerful combo, but when you add in Acorn's AppleScript (and JSTalk) support, you can get just about anything done.

And as always, if you have any ideas for tutorials or other things you'd like to know how to do- send a note to support@flyingmeat.com

We're happy to let everyone know that VoodooPad 5.0.3 has been released for direct customers. Download the new version, or even better- use the VoodooPad ▸ Check for Updates… menu item to update to the latest version. The App Store version of VP 5.0.3 was submitted yesterday as well, and hopefully Apple won't take too long to review and release it.

5.0.3 is a bug fix update, with a couple of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion fixes in it. Release notes are available for the curious.

We've also submitted VoodooPad for iOS version 2.0.2- so that should be out sometime soon (we hope!). It has some bug fixes (including some syncing improvements folks have been waiting for), and Markdown pages are now rendered when viewing them.

Next up, VoodooPad 5.1.

Acorn 3.3 is now available! It now features support for the new Retina MacBook Pros (via a "Retina Canvas"), Smart Layer Export (if you're a web or app designer, you'll love this), selection improvements, text improvements, and more. Check out the release notes for the full details.

If you purchased it through the App Store- don't worry Acorn 3.3 coming! Eventually. Acorn is still waiting in the queue down in Cupertino and it could either be a couple of days or even weeks till it's out (we submitted Acorn 3.3 on June 25th- and we've heard that sandboxed applications now take longer to go through the review process).

HOWEVER - if you've purchased Acorn through the App Store you can easily switch to the direct version just by downloading it off our website. Acorn will figure out that you've run the App Store version and automatically register itself.

Why didn't we wait till the App Store version was approved? With 10.8 coming out soon (Acorn 3.3 also includes Gatekeeper support) and the new Retina machines - we decided we wanted folks to get their hands on this sooner rather than later.

So grab Acorn 3.3, and have fun with it.