Images are a big part of my life. There’s work for sure. At home I don’t craft as much, but I take a fair number of photos. As a result there are two major things one does with photos, view them and modify them.

Let’s start with the latter first. Recently Gus Mueller of Flying Meat released a new image editing app, Acorn. Acorn is fast, lightweight, and uncluttered. Sure, there will probably be times when the big grand-daddy of image editing will be needed, but as it stands I’m going to stick with Acorn whenever I can because it does most everything I want. I need to learn how to write plug-ins for Acorn and then I think it will be what I use almost exclusively.

As for the former, viewing images, OS X comes with a nice built-in tool in Preview. Possibly Quick Look in Leopard will be better, but I’m not there yet so I can’t say. For now I prefer all of my images to be previewed and opened with Xee. Xee is fast, lightweight, free, and supports more image formats than you can shake a stick at.
While the icon for Xee is inspired a designer named Adam Betts has developed a replacement icon set for Xee that is quite beautiful. I’ve switched my home install of Xee over to it and I’ll hit my work install next week.