Acorn 8.1 is out. Full release notes are available as well.

For a .1 update, there are a bunch of new features and improvements. I think I was riding on the high of a great 8.0 release and felt compelled to keep on adding cool stuff.

As already mentioned, Acorn 8.1 includes a new scrub zoom which has been a long-standing request.

Another long-standing request included in 8.1 is the ability to resize selections using on-canvas handles, or via the palette.

Autosave has also had a revamp. There are three options now: "Off", "Native Acorn Images", and "All Images". The default is set to saving native images (.acorn).

In Acorn 8.0 (and previous versions), when autosave was enabled, non-native files (.jpeg, .png) would open without a reference to the original file on disk. This is no longer the case in Acorn 8.1, where non-native files open with a reference to the original file, and pressing ⌘S will save back to the original, regardless of the autosave setting.

Why the change? I found myself wanting autosaving of files where full fidelity would always be preserved (which is what happens when you save .acorn files), but that behavior didn't always make sense when opening a .jpeg file. JPEG files are lossy, so opening and saving the image multiple times would degrade the quality of the image. That's not awesome. And you would also lose the edibility of text and layers.

To make the autosave behavior work with multiple file types took a bit of runtime dynamics, especially since I wanted everything to work seamlessly with the macOS frameworks and versions support. I eventually got there with a bit of help from Dave DeLong, which was much appreciated. I had a solution, but I don't think it was nearly as good as what Dave came up with.

There are also a handful of bug fixes and other improvements that are worth looking over the release notes for.

I've also been regularly updating the documentation, and any changes of note get mentioned in the update log of the docs.

What's next? I plan on giving Retrobatch a bit of attention. It's a fun app to work on as well, and there's always common functionality that can pass back and forth with Acorn.