It’s not even Thanksgiving yet, but we’re already thinking about Black Friday. Luckily, in this day and age, you don’t need to leave the couch to jump on great deals. In fact, you don’t even need to open a box.

Acorn is one of the two best¹ Mac image editors for normal humans. Retrobatch, from the same developer, is a batch-processor for images, letting you build simple or fancy workflows that can do pretty much anything to your images, automatically. If you regularly resize photos, remove location data, add watermarks, or anything else, this is for you.

Even crazier is Retrobatch’s machine-learning component, which can apply filters and operations based on what it sees in the image. For instance, you could drop a folder of images onto Retrobatch, and it would check them all and only apply filters to pictures of hot dogs. That’s right. It can detect pictures of hot dogs.

Many of us want to invest, but don’t know how to start. Acorns is a new, free to try app that makes investing as easy as using your debit card and rounding up the change to the nearest dollar.

If you’re not already using Acorn for Mac OS X, now might be the time to give this Photoshop alternative a look. The newest version, Acorn 4, just hit developer Flying Meat’s web page, coming in at an affordable thirty bucks and a host of improvements, tweaks, and additional features.

I recently switched to a MacBook Air for writing, and it is easily the best Mac I’ve owned in terms of speed and comfort. But, like the sports car your friends assume you’ll sell now that you have kids on the way, the Air is also lacking in space1.

Now, I’m using this 128GB (with 4GB RAM) 13-inch MacBook Air primarily for work, but that doesn’t mean I want to ditch my music, TV shows and photos altogether. Luckily, with modern Internet™ Technology™ I don’t have to. I can use cloud services and a little judicious tidying to make my New York walkup-sized MacBook Air feels like a mansion.

Think Retina display Macs are a gimmick? Think again: Mac developer Gus Mueller is almost ready to pop out an update to the Acorn image editing app which will use the Retina display on the new MacBook Pro to spectacular (and rather useful) effect.

Acorn describes itself as “an image editor for humans”, and that sums it up in a nutshell.

What you get inside Acorn are pretty much all the image editing features you’re ever going to need, for a fraction of the price of some of the competing apps.

Every new Mac comes with iPhoto, which is getting better all the time. Still, it doesn’t have all of the features that are made for folks who are really into manipulating their photgraphs. Adobe’s Photoshop is often too much for the budding shooter (and cost prohibitive to boot), and image editors like Acorn – while simple to use and well-priced – don’t necessarily have the “feel” of iPhoto that many Mac users are used to.

This is where FX Photo Studio Pro by MacPhun ($40 in the Mac App Store) comes in.

Image editing application Acorn has been updated to version 3, and now comes with a boatload of new features for you to play with.