Hello, Skitch!
Well, that was fun. I feel like all that I’ve been doing over the last few days is giving out Skitch invites and inviting more people to try it! I think we should back pedal a little to explain what exactly happened and why I’m surprised at the response.
Ever since I got my hands on Skitch people have been asking me for copies. I had told the plasq crew that I’d do an overview of it for my site, so I did, and they were nice enough to give me a few “invites” to give out as a result. Those invites, and many more, flew off the shelf faster than Cris Pearson could send them out. Based on this response, I knew people wanted Skitch as badly as I did, and so I had decided that the moment it was made available – I’d be sure to tell everyone about it.
Fast forward to this past Thursday, when Skitch was scheduled to go public beta, and I was all set to blog, instant message, and tell my contacts in the Mac news industry that I wanted them to link to Skitch. So I created a simple blog post, showing off Skitch and announcing that it was public and bam! Instant flood. So I ended up sending out hundreds of copies of Skitch (and I’m still sending them out at a rate of 10 or so an hour trying to keep up) and I’m really surprised that somehow my blog because the destination to get Skitch invites.
As you can see from the statistics graph on the right, my blog got a huge spike in traffic since all this Skitch stuff happened. And even though this is a personal blog, my blog is no slouch, so seeing such an increase really does show that people are really interested in Skitch. Read some of the comments on the release post, people are coming back to say thank you and tell me how much they like Skitch!
You can still help
I’m running out of invites. I’m sure I could ask plasq for more and they’d hook me up. However, my main reason for doing all of this was to see Skitch get out to as many people as possible. So, how can you help? Please blog about Skitch if you have a copy. Don’t link to my blog, unless you want to, but primarily link to the main Skitch site. Also, don’t be afraid to embed their demo movie on your site (it even works on WordPress.com blogs!). Lets see if we can repay plasq for their generosity, time, and effort that they’ve put into Skitch. Oh, and when it goes GOLD – buy a copy.
You know, you mention buying a copy – this is pretty much the only thing I’ve seen on the web that I would buy a copy of. It makes it VERY easy for me to browse through my bird photos in iphoto, and then skitch them, upload them and then copy and paste the tag (on the skitch page) into my blog. Sure beats opening them in photoshop and tweaking them for a half hour to get the dpi and the size exactly right.
The only thing is I noticed on their help page that the stuff I uploaded onto my skitch page might get erased, so I’m not uploading to the skitch page anymore, since I don’t want a bunch of empty photo spots in my blog. Instead I set up a flickr page to upload them to, which with skitch is a snap. There are a few more steps of writing out the code to link from my blog to the photo in flickr. Of course I could just save the pic file to my computer and upload it to wordpress (but there again even a few more additional steps involved.) The skitch way is easier, faster, spontaneous. It lets you be creative.
Here’s another use of skitch from yesterday – a friend of mine was thinking of going bird watching in a remote location. He wasn’t sure if there was a trailhead there. I had birded there and knew where the trailhead was. I was going to try and explain where it was, but that would take five minutes to type out, and he might not understand exactly where I meant. I then went to googlemaps and found the spot and was going to copy and paste the url and send him that. Then I remembered I had skitch, so I skitched the google map, and wrote a little text and drew an arrow, and emailed it to him. (cutting and pasting a google maps url seems archaic to me now).
Anyway, this ap is great – thanks again Colin for the beta.
My (german) blog post: http://www.keepmefromblogging.de/2007/06/19/skitch-snap-draw-share/