To my mind the more obvious competitor to Acorn is not Photoshop, but Photoshop Elements. I think it will be very healthy for both products. Different philosophies, different customers, and some cross pollination will occur. I think the same thing is going to happen with Acorn vs. On the other hand, I've got customers who own both Yojimbo and VoodooPad as well, so that works out perfectly from my point of view. 90% of the time, the type of person who uses Yojimbo isn't the type of person who uses VoodooPad. I wasn't - the two applications had different philosophies. When Yojimbo from Bare Bones came out, I got lots of emails asking if I was worried. Even though there aren't many other "wiki" notebooks out there, there are plenty of other "put your information in it" type of applications, which is really what VoodooPad is. One thing that I've learned from working on VoodooPad- the market of mac users is big enough for all of us. Acorn is aimed at the folks for whom Photoshop isn't an option, because Photoshop is too complicated for them. I get the feeling that Pixelmator is trying to go after the folks who use Photoshop on a daily basis. I really think that's where they stop being similar though. Both are new, both are Cocoa, both use Core Image filters heavily. Yea- people have been comparing the two against each other, which I think is natural. Speaking of others, have you played with Pixelmator at all? Do you have any comment about Acorn vis-a-vis Pixelmator? Some of my testers weren't so sure, but it grew on them as well. It took a little bit of getting used to, but I really liked it. Then one day about a month ago, I decided I was going to try and put everything in one palette. And I just started slowly merging them together till I had two. Acorn had about 4 palettes open at one time in the beginning- Layers, tools, info, color, fonts. What's funny is, Acorn didn't start out that way. Photoshop had a ton of them, and everyone else that wanted to be Photoshop followed suit. It was mainly all the palettes that didn't fit in my mode. You also mention (vaguely) some other lower-cost image editors, but you say that they don't fit your "mode." What did you mean by that? What does Acorn do that others don't? I wanted a really easy to use image editor for myself, and I've heard other folks say the same thing. My hope is that anyone who is intimidated by Photoshop or the Gimp will find a welcome interface in Acorn. I designed Acorn for anyone who just wants to quickly open up an image and add text or play with pixels. So what kind of user did you have in mind when you were writing Acorn? Whom is Acorn for? In your mischievous self-interview you seem to talk a lot about Photoshop, but you're straightforward in admitting that Acorn isn't going to replace Photoshop. We've interviewed Gus before with interesting results, so last evening we again (virtually) sat down with Gus to ask him a few questions about Acorn itself, the development process, his company, and a little of what the future holds. As we mentioned yesterday, Gus Mueller and Flying Meat software just released Acorn, a new, relatively low-cost image editor for the Mac.
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