By Dan Moren

Acorn 8 brings subject selection, Live Text, Data Merge, more

Not unlike text editors, image-editing software is a category that provokes strong feelings from its users. There are your Photoshop fans, Affinity users, and those who adore Pixelmator.¹

Personally, I’ve been a longtime user of Flying Meat’s Acorn—and I do mean longtime: all the way back to version 1.0. Even though I’m primarily someone who deals with words, Acorn is an app that I find myself using daily, often for something as simple as cropping or resizing an image, but I’ve also used it for more complex tasks like designing book covers.

The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s also a corresponding “Remove Background” feature to simplify that task) and a Live Text tool allows you to select and copy text within an image.

For me, the star of the show is the fascinating Data Merge, which is a bit like Mail Merge for images. If you’ve ever needed to create the same image several times but with different information—nametags, for example, or personalized gift cards—this is a life-saver. You open your template image, identify your variables, then hand Acorn a CSV file with the relevant data and it will process through them, assigning text where needed and even putting images in assigned layers. It’s the kind of wild automation tool that might not be something you need every day, but when you do need it, there’s really no replacement.

Acorn 8 has a bunch of other great additions, including an on-canvas ruler, support for JPEG-XL, and compatibility with Look up Tables (LUT) that let you quickly apply image color adjustments. And, be still my beating heart, there’s improved support for Shortcuts, for everything from cropping and resizing images to adding watermarks and dynamically assigning text.

There’s currently an introductory sale for Acorn 8: for a limited time, it’s just $19.99 instead of its usual $29.99, and there’s also a bundle with Flying Meat’s equally excellent Retrobatch batch image processing app. Plus, you’re supporting a small independent Mac developer, and that’s a good reason in and of itself.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

Appearance: Apple Intelligence’s generic humans

On Wednesday iOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2 were released, and we wrote about it here. One of my complaints is that you can’t just make generic figures of people—you have to choose actual people in your library.

This is wrong. You can do it—I just completely missed the feature, because it wasn’t positioned or labeled in a way that made me understand what I was looking at. In the interest of correcting the record and also informing people whose brains work like mine, here’s the deal:

To create an image in Image Playground that doesn’t use the face of someone you know, click or tap the Choose… button with the word Person above it. This will bring up the person picker, full of faces from your Photos library. But in the top left corner of the picker is another option, Appearance.

The first time you click or tap Appearance, you’ll be prompted to choose a default appearance for your creations. (In subsequent creations, it’ll default to your previous choice, but you can change it by tapping Edit.)

In the Appearance view, you’ll be able to choose from five different skin tones and then from three different collections of Appearances. This is where it gets a little weird: Rather that building a person, Memoji style, you choose from three different collections of thumbnails, which are the various Appearances that might come up when you generate an image. They appear to be weighted by gender, so the leftmost is (mostly?) women, the rightmost men, the middle more of a grab bag—but there’s a lot of variation between each collection of Appearances.

That’s it. When you select a set, you’re ready to create an image. Unlike images generated from one specific person, you’ll find that different generations will be very different in this mode, because the entire appearance of the person can vary. As I swiped through a single set, I found young women, older women, young men, and people of various racial groups. It’s a grab bag. It’s meant to be generic. Go with it.

Once you’ve picked the Appearance, you can still add all the other prompts you want, either picked from Apple’s suggestion list or from your own terms. (I generated a bunch of starship captains with laser guns in space, enough to pack an entire star fleet.)

In Genmoji, instead of picking an Appearance, you pick an “Emoji” as a starting point. You can choose between the generic female, non-gender-specific, or male emoji templates, and choose a skin tone. All the genemojis you create will be based on that template.

By Jason Snell

Last updated April 2, 2025

Mic Drop mutes your microphone everywhere

I’ve gotten so used to having a physical mute button on my podcast recording setup that it’s quite disconcerting when I use a different setup that doesn’t offer one.

In the winter months, I work most of the time in “Studio B”, a second desk in a back bedroom that’s climate controlled in a way my drafty garage can’t be. My microphone here is a sturdy Shure MV7, but I’m connecting it via USB and its mute button is a capacitive circle that’s super awkward to reach.

As a result, I’ve been trying to find a simple way to mute that microphone using a similar gesture—push to mute, push again to unmute—that I use in my primary recording setup. After exploring a bunch of options, I’ve settled on Mic Drop, a free ($5 upgrade for pro features) Mac utility that does the job perfectly.

Mic Drop literally does everything I expected from it. It lives in your menu bar and has support for global hotkeys or AppleScript, optional audio and multiple visual notifications of mute status, the ability to choose which mics are muted and which ones aren’t, and even an optional push-to-talk toggle mode.

It’s a delight to find an app that doesn’t just do the basics, but (via its recently-released 2.0 update) offers all sorts of polish that elevate into a utility that’s truly worth recommending.

MicDrop is available in the Mac App Store.

(Update: It now supports Stream Deck natively, too, which is awesome.)

By Six Colors Staff

iOS 18.2/macOS 15.2 Review: Picture not so perfect?

Apple Intelligence is back, and this time it’s visual. With the iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS 15.2 updates, Apple is rolling out its second round of generative AI features, including its first image-related features like Genmoji, Image Playground, and Image Wand.

These features are, on the whole, more ambitious than the initial batch released back in in October, and some of them build on those features: for example, the ability to now generate specific changes to text in Writing Tools. This also marks the first third-party integration of generative AI features into Apple’s own platforms, with the ability to connect to ChatGPT.

Apple Intelligence features are also expanding geographically with these releases, coming to more versions of English, and there are even a few non-AI related features in the mix too, such as improvements to AirPlay and a new mail categorization feature on iOS.

But does this latest round of AI features move the needle in Apple’s quest to improve its users lives? Let’s delve in and see.

Continue reading “iOS 18.2/macOS 15.2 Review: Picture not so perfect?”…

By Jason Snell

Simply brings its piano app to Vision Pro

I took piano lessons when I was a kid, and always hated practicing. I can blame it on the cold room we kept the piano in, but part of the reason I hated it was that most of what I played was boring. (I didn’t love having to take a long school bus ride to my piano lessons, either.)

This week I took Simply Piano for Vision Pro for a spin, and it was anything from boring. The popular iPad app for teaching piano has come to Vision Pro, and so I sat down at the very same piano I used to practice on as a kid—it’s in a somewhat warmer room now—but with a Vision Pro over my head.

Simply Piano works by listening to you playing notes and detecting if you’re playing the right or wrong ones. It’s very clever, but the Vision Pro version adds in the ability to overlay a virtual keyboard on your real one, so it can provide visual cues (in the form of glowing notes) when you’re not sure which key to play. It also annotates your fingers, so you can see which fingers are supposed to play which notes.

Even all these years later, I’ve got sight reading skills above Simply Piano’s introductory lessons, but as I went through the introductory lessons I found that the visual augmentation did feel a bit like magic. If I had any complaints, it was that sometimes Simply Piano struggled to recognize when I was playing notes, especially two of the same note in quick succession.

The Vision Pro app also comes with a virtual keyboard feature that allows you to practice on any flat surface, by overlaying a keyboard and letting you play it. I like this idea a lot, but in practice I found that it didn’t work very well. It played incorrect notes and even played notes when my fingers weren’t down. I think there’s something here—and having the ability to practice piano when you don’t have a keyboard handy is an amazing idea!—but I gave up pretty quickly and went back to my real piano.

Maybe if I had an iPad, or a Vision Pro, I would’ve practiced the piano more faithfully back in the day. Or maybe not. But this app seems to do a pretty great job of teaching the basics of piano, no teacher (or long school bus ride) required.