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Choice is good. If you’re a graphics pro, then Adobe Photoshop is probably the weapon you already have. For lots of folks, specifically bloggers and students, smaller set of tools and a commensurately reduced price are what’s needed. Acorn fits that bill.

FlyingMeat has updated their highly capable yet compact $50 image editor for the rest of us. Whereas the last release delivered layer masks and new Automator actions, among other things, Acorn 2.5.1 (release notes) is a straight maintenance update that quashes a couple dozen bugs:

• Fixed a bug where Acorn wouldn’t let you resize a free transform when zoomed out to 25%.
• Fixed a bug where you couldn’t delete the % character from the simple transform palatte.
• When using the rectangle selection, it doesn’t snap to the edge of the document, since it turns out that’s pretty annoying most of the time.
• Fixed a bug where you couldn’t use the pan tool when you clicked on top of a vector shape to begin moving the image.
• Renamed the ‘Hand’ tool to ‘Pan’ in the View ▸ Tool menu.
• The up and down arrow keys now work in the rotate field of the canvas rotate palette.
• Fixed a bug where your image was interpolated when you were zoomed in and you were rotating the canvas.
• And, 14 more fixes n’ tweaks

Acordn 2.5.x requires Mac OS X 10.6 or higher, though FlyingMeat maintains Snow Leopard and Tiger versions. Get your copy of Acorn 2.5.1 here (14.9MB) and, yes, there’s a demo that’s good for 30 days.