Acorn 2.2 is out. It took a little longer than I had hoped, but it's ready now and that's good. Go grab it.

Here are the big changes (you can find the full list in the release notes):

• Lots more documentation.
  Christie, my new support ninja + graphics design student has been hard at work adding lots more tutorials, which should help out anyone new to Acorn.


• Bézier Shapes!
  Acorn finally adds Bézier curves to it's vector tools. Right now, it's pretty bare bones, and I know everyone is going to want to do more with them. Just give me time, and your features will probably end up being added.


• Newer, faster, better, stronger flood fill implementation.
  The flood fill that Acorn used previous to 2.2 was kind of flaky. It screwed up colors sometimes (yay colorspaces!), was super slow on big images, and even crashed on occasion. I hired Guy English to redo it in OpenCL for Acorn 2.2, and it works much better now. (Guy doesn't work for Flying Meat, this was just a contract job).


• Lock Layers
  You can now lock layers using the layer contextual menu item, or the Layer ▸ Lock Layer menu item.


• Precision Mode for brushes
  A new "Precision Mode" button for the brush tool, which lets you make your brush strokes in slllllooooooowwwwww mooooooootttttttiiiiiooonnnn. This is handy if you want super fine accuracy when touching up an image.


• New advanced prefs pane, with fancy 'advanced' stuff.
  Change the full screen background color, how fast the precision brush moves, and some other nifty options.


• New "Scale Transform"
  An additional Transform operation "Scale Transform" has been added, bringing the total up to 3. All the transform commands have been moved under a new Layer ▸ Transform menu, and the Scale Transform now uses the ⌘⇧T shortcut, since this is the most common type of transform that folks are trying to do. I've already had some positive feedback about it, so I think this was a good choice to make.


• New UI for canvas rotate + scale transform
  Controls have been moved into the palette when you rotate and scale your image. I find it makes a nicer experience


• Crop Improvements
  Select All now works while you are cropping, and sets the crop to the whole canvas.


• Shape Tool Improvements
  You can now change the bounds of a selected shape from the tools palette. This is a welcome comeback from Acorn 1.x.


• Trackpad Gesture Support
  Trackpad support for zooming, rotating the canvas, three finger swipes for undo and redo, as well as changing the current layer.


• Canvas "Ghosting"
  I'm really not sure what to call this new feature. Shape handles are now drawn outside the canvas when the frame of the graphic are outside the canvas bounds, and bitmaps falling outside the canvas are given a ghost of their bounds.

There's a couple of more little new features, as well as bug fixes of course. All the gory details are in the release notes. If you run into bugs, have suggestions or feature requests, make sure to mail support@flyingmeat.com so we know about them!