Acorn 4.1 came out a couple of days ago for direct customers, and it became available via the Mac App Store this afternoon.

There's some fun new features (and of course bug fixes). A new Background Blur filter, CMYK export for JPEG images, new commands to flip the whole canvas, support for multipage TIFF files, PDF vector export, a new spotlight importer, and more. As usual, you can read the release notes for all the details.

A bit more on the Background Blur filter, which I though up after the iOS 7 introduction a couple of months ago. iOS 7 has a new look in some areas where the background gets blurred out so you can focus on what's in the foreground. This has always been possible to mock up in image editors, but it can be a bit of a pain to get right and if you want to change things around then that's a pain as well. So I came up with a new filter which would do exactly what you wanted, and was super easy to use. It's a bit hard to explain so make sure to watch this quick video which goes over it:

Did you know we've got a bunch more video tutorials in Acorn's documentation? Here's another recent one I made, which shows how to clip images using vector layers:

So grab Acorn 4.1 if you haven't already. And we're already getting started on Acorn 4.2, which is going to have something rather awesome packed in it which I can't wait to tell you about.