Scratch from the Ice Age films seems to have been on to something with his endless quest for Acorns. I just got my hands on the new Acorn image editor from Flying Meat software, and I’m already in love. At at introductory price of $40 bucks, Acorn at first seems like a lot to ask for something that competes with Preview or Skitch, but upon close inspections turns out to be the deal of the year.

Billing itself as simple and easy to use, Acorn is so much more than just another Mac image editor. Secret coding sauce allows Acorn to utilize your computers GPU to greatly increase the speed at which you can go about working with images, using many tools– such as layers, filters, and gradients– usually relegated to expensive and over-powered products like Photoshop.

In addition to its speed, Acorn sports an intuitive user interface which does away with the traditional palette paradigm of other similar programs and replaces it with a single tool window which changes its contents to reflect your current actions.

(The image for this post was created using Acorn in under a minute.)