Acorn 8.6 Is Out, and Some Geeky Info on the New Brush Tool

Acorn 8.6 is out! The big new things are: A new brushing engine that has been rewritten using Metal shaders. It includes an option for “velocity thinning”, where the faster you draw your brush strokes, the thinner the lines. A new acorn shell tool that you can use to send JavaScript to Acorn, as well as start an MCP server. So if you’ve got a favorite LLM you like to use, you can now use it to drive Acorn. The JavaScript section of the release notes are a good read if you’re interested in that. In addition: The JS API has also been updated with examples for most calls. The shell tool has a -jsio argument which lets you do things like: echo "acorn.takeLayeredScreenshot();" | acorn -jsio Big ML models (used for Select Subject and Super Resolution Scaling) are now downloaded on demand. If AI isn’t your thing, they won’t take up any space on your Mac. If you do use those features, the models are downloaded once and cached, and future Acorn updates are faster because those models no longer…