What are the best mac applications for developing pixel art?

I think the main features you’re after are:

1. Being able to paint with a non-antialiased pencil or brush.
2. Nearest neighbour scaling (keep blocky things blocky when you scale).
3. Non-antialiased selections.
4. Layers.
5. Being able to export the formats you’ll need (PNG? GIF?).

Based on that criteria, there’s a few tools that can do it. Pixen is awesome, and worth investigating:

• https://pixenapp.com

I’d also highly recommend Photoshop, predominately using the Pencil Tool — it does exactly what you’re after, letting you paint non-antialiased pixels easily. It also has some other tools that might be handy, like posterisation.

Acorn would be my second option on the Mac. It has a pencil tool that’s similar to Photoshop, as well as nearest neighbour scaling (if you need it). It’s also far cheaper and available on the Mac App Store, if that’s a concern.

Both Photoshop and Acorn have the full list of features above.

• Flying Meat Acorn
• Adobe Photoshop