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 ((Yes, that is the company name, and he makes fantastic software)) 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. ((If you’re using The Unarchiver from the same person, Dag Ågren, then it can even look inside archives like Zip, Rar, and StuffIt. Trust me, even if you don’t use Xee you should use The Unarchiver. It’s simply brilliant)) 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.