Acorn 7.4.4 is out, and it's a free update for anyone with an Acorn 7 license.

As previously mentioned, I'm not incrementing Acorn past the 7.4 number ('74 was a good year for me). But that doesn't mean I'm not adding new features, and this release has some. Here are some highlights straight from the release notes:

• Super Resolution ML resizing. This new option in the Image ▸ Resize Image… menu item lets you increase the size of your image up to 4x using Machine Learning. Or is it AI now? I don't know and don't care, but it's pretty awesome! It packs a ton of crazy statistics and math into a simple little dropdown menu. Give it a shot for your photos, you won't be disappointed. (Super Resolution is for MacOS 12 or later only).

• Stroke Selections! Finally. You can now perform this long requested feature via the Select menu, and even works with Magic Wand selections (MacOS 11 or later only). Change your stroke size, blending, anti-alias or not, and even add a fill.

• You can now convert Magic Wand selections to shape layers. This is also super awesome! If you've got a fun outline of something that you want to convert into a shape, this is the way. (MacOS 11 or later only).

• New "Simple Film Grain" filter, which will add a grainy overlay to your image. Just like Grandpa's photos used to have.

Other Interesting things:

• The Text Palette now shows what the font looks like in the font pop-up menus.
• Holding down the backslash key ('') will temporarily switch off any layer filters you have on selected layers.
• The tool palette will now dim tools that you can't use in modal operations (such as when cropping, scaling and rotating, and similar operations).
• Neat new trick with the Shortcuts Crop action: If you choose "Custom" as the position and put in negative values, the canvas will expand instead of shrink. A negative X value will increase the size on the left, Y on the bottom, Width on the right, and Height for the top.
• Various little improvements to the File Info window, including shortcuts (Command 1-4) to switch between the sections.
• Double clicking on a non-bézier shape with the anchor select tool will now convert it to a bézier shape (previously this only worked with the move tool (shortcut key 'v').
• A new Shortcuts action to open images in Acorn.
• Various improvements to Acorn's SVG importer.
• The AppleScript command do filter name "Your Filter Preset Name Here" will now work with filter presets as well. This is in addition to the call filter preset with name command. There is a story behind this. It isn't very good.

And of course, I have squashed some bugs as well, and you can read about those in the full release notes.

Retrobatch has been getting most of my attention lately (the upcoming 2.1 release includes LUT support!) but working on Acorn always brings joy, and I have lots more fun things planned for in the future.