An overview of Skitch
I’d seen Skitch pop up on Flickr and various Mac-related web sites for quite awhile before I got my hands on a copy. I’d wanted to try it but there is no open beta yet available. I thought this was because Skitch was unstable or simply not ready for the public eye. Boy was I wrong - but more about that in a minute.
As with other overviews I’ve written I want to take you back to the time I first downloaded Skitch and met its designer Cris Pearson. I was sitting at a table in the Mashroom at Web2Open in the Moscone Center (which was caught by Scott Beale in this photo). Cris pulls up a chair next to me and begins enjoying his lunch provided by the Expo and we get to talking about Skitch. Details are a little fuzzy because of the number of conversations I had at that table but he quickly launched his Dashboard and was able to create an account for me which then emailed me a link to download Skitch for myself. I was thoroughly impressed with the way he setup his account activation process so I knew I was in for a treat with Skitch.
Being incredibly busy during events such as the Expo I was unable to give Skitch a thorough run through until I got home. Since then I’ve been using Skitch pretty regularly for both work and play and I’ve been loving every minute of it.
Me wishing my salad was made of Skitch.
Skitch’s features
How can an application, with the primary purpose of taking screenshots, quickly become one of my favorites? I think it is a combination of the user interface and how well thought-out Skitch really is. Skitch is jammed packed with features yet the interface for those features never gets in your way or becomes overbearing. This is the result of a ton of research, trial and error, and well thought out design by Cris and his team. Here are the main features of Skitch as I see it:
Quickly take a screenshot in just about anyway you can think of. The Mac OS has some really great shortcut keys for taking screenshots. You can select a specific viewable area for your screenshot, select a specific window, or capture your entire screen space. Skitch wraps all of these into an easy to use UI that then lets you “do something” with that screenshot.
Then you can annotate a screenshot once you’ve captured it. By adding shapes, arrows, text, etc. you can quickly highlight and draw attention to the specific parts of the screenshot that you’d like to. Or, you can put earrings on dogs. I remember doing this type of thing in Photoshop for years and what a pain that was! Not only was I forced to open an application that is far too complex for this type of simple annotation but it hogged all of my memory!
Sharing your screenshot with the world is probably Skitch’s strong suit. Skitch is not just an application but it also connects to a hosting service provided by plasq called MySkitch. MySkitch gives you a simple way to share your screenshots without worrying about saving, emailing, or FTPing those files to those you want to share with. With one-click your screenshot is available for the world to see! You don’t want to use MySkitch because all of your friends use Flickr? No problem because Skitch supports MySkitch, .Mac, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and of course Flickr. I’m fairly certain that this list will grow before and after launch of the final product.
Taking photos with your webcam is dead simple. Skitch does not come equipped with all of the effects that Photo Booth does, but if you need a quick way to take a snapshot with your webcam, annotate it, and share it - Skitch is for you.
The little things
The main thing that separates the good applications from the great applications is attention to detail. Skitch has a few ‘little things’ that both surprised and impressed me.
First was the delete feature. Skitch saves an entire history of your screenshots (which in itself is great), but the history remembers where you shared that file. So, when you go to delete something out of your history that you may have shared via Flickr, Skitch will ask if you’d like to delete the local file, the file that you shared on Flickr, or both. How cool is that?
Howdy, from Skitch.
I suppose the second would have to be the ability to drag the “drag me” file from the bottom of the window at any point while you’re editing the original screenshot. Instead of saving and sharing what you’ve done so far you can quickly drag that “drag me” file into an instant message, email, onto your desktop, or into a document. This saves a lot of time and also saves your Skitch history from having multiple copies of unfinished work.
Resizing screenshots has always been a hassle. Perhaps you’ve taken a screenshot of your entire desktop which spans thousands of pixels in every direction and you’d like to share that with someone via email who may not even have the same resolution as you do. Simply resizing skitch to be the size you want your screenshot to be (which is indicated in the bottom left hand corner) will resize your screenshot automatically.
There is a lot about Skitch that I’m leaving out. Really I wanted to provide a general overview of why I like Skitch so much and why I recommend that you register to be notified of Skitch’s public release. Also be sure to read what everyone else is saying about Skitch so that you know I am not alone.
Want an invite to try Skitch?
Cris was kind enough to allow me to give away five invites to use the latest Skitch beta along with getting yourself a shiny new MySkitch account. After noodling it for a bit I’ve decided on who is going to get these invites. The first five people to write a blog post about how they’d use Skitch (linking to both this entry and the Skitch site) will receive a MySkitch account and a beta copy of Skitch. Be sure to trackback this entry so that I see it and if you don’t know how to do that send me an email (which is on my about page).
Happy Skitching!
Tags: applications, california, cris-pearson, design, flickr, macintosh, moscone-center, overview, Photos, plasq, san-francisco, scott-beale, screenshots, skitch, user-interface, web2expo, web2open, webcam
May 21st, 2007 at 10:13 am
[...] I would use Skitch Posted May 21, 2007 Well, Colin is apparently giving away Skitch invites, no way I could pass up a chance to get in on this [...]
May 21st, 2007 at 11:26 am
My response is at http://blog.chrismasto.com/articles/2007/05/21/how-id-use-skitch but it failed to send the ping for some reason. One of these days I need to either dig around in the guts of Typo and get it working properly, or switch to something else.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:57 am
Skitch-eroo…
For awhile now I have been seeing photos uploaded to Flickr using a little program called Skitch and never really gave it much thought until reading more about it in a post made by Colin Devroe pointing out some of it's very useful features and it…
May 21st, 2007 at 12:25 pm
[...] to Colin for giving me an opportunity to blog about a program I don’t [...]
May 21st, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Manual trackback, as your site doesn’t seem to like trackbacks from TAO.
http://theartisticoutlaw.com/skitch-and-how-id-use-it/
Thanks.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Also doing a manual trackback here….
http://sporadicnonsense.com/index.php/site/skitch_eroo/
Thanks Colin!
May 21st, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Sorry Shawn and James: I was en route to Panera and couldn’t approve your trackbacks fast enough. Keep them coming, if I get enough of these maybe, just maybe, Cris will leak a few more invites to me.
May 21st, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Shawn and James: Let me clarify. I am not saying sorry because you didn’t get any Skitch invites, I’m saying sorry that I didn’t approve your trackbacks faster. You both are getting invites to use Skitch and MySkitch.
May 21st, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Sweet thanks Colin, let me know when you send it out so I can keep an eye out in my Junk mail folders as well.
May 21st, 2007 at 8:07 pm
and if I’m too late……oh well, it’s just my fault
but god do I hope I’m not…
thanks colin for the opportunity
PS: you have a really cool blog……definitely being added to Newsfire
May 21st, 2007 at 8:14 pm
PING: http://josiah.wordpress.com/2007/05/21/how-i-would-use-skitch/
Hmmm, skitches.
May 21st, 2007 at 8:24 pm
PPS: I Don’t have a blog…….but I do have a facebook, and I’m definitely sharing this and the original post on it
May 21st, 2007 at 8:30 pm
http://hs.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=2434882675&created&suggest
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:31 am
James E. Robinson, III: Are you trying to use Josiah’s post as your entry? I don’t get it?
Jacob: Excellent.
To all: I’ll be sending all of the requests to Cris today, so if you still want an invite just make sure to get your blog post done by 12EST. That is when I am cutting it off. Then you’ll all get your invites.
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:57 am
er, beware copy and paste: http://blog.robinsonhouse.com/2007/05/grab-gimp-gmail-skitch.html
May 22nd, 2007 at 7:09 am
James E. Robinson, III: Ah, yes. Beware indeed!
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:20 pm
[...] wrote an overview of Skitch and it’s pretty spot [...]
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Whoa.. mayt!!
Thanks for a great preview Colin!
And thanks for all the nice blog posts guys! I’ll be sending off the invites soon! Hope you like it!
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:25 am
Woohoo! I can’t wait. I’m itchin’ for some Skitchin’.
May 24th, 2007 at 4:37 am
Great blog post, makes Skitch all the more appealing!
I don’t have a blog or a website >mock shock horror!
May 24th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Still checking my e-mail every 5 minutes
May 24th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
I sent emails to everyone. Did you not receive one Chris?
May 24th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
It seems that my spam filter ate it. :-/ I sent you a message through your blog with an alternate e-mail address. Hope it works. Sorry for being difficult.
May 25th, 2007 at 12:26 am
I didn’t get one……
May 25th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Great write up… was wondering if you had another invite left over.
May 26th, 2007 at 9:55 am
I guess I missed my chance.
May 26th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
masto, did you get that one? Just sent another
May 26th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
I got it this time and it rocks!
May 27th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Are there any invites remaining? I would really apprecitate one! Thanks….
June 4th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Great review and how can I get a copy?! Great sell. Your description of the features was very good.
June 14th, 2007 at 8:26 am
[...] may have read my overview of Skitch or maybe you saw the countless images tagged with skitch on Flickr - and perhaps you want to join [...]
June 16th, 2007 at 10:28 am
[...] 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 [...]
June 17th, 2007 at 8:21 am
Skitch looks so impressive, perfect for the Mac! I can’t wait to try it
June 18th, 2007 at 12:37 am
[...] to Colin Devroe, I got a preview copy of the much-awaited Mac app called Skitch, which comes bundled with access to [...]
June 19th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Dear Colin, Just wanted to thank you for the Skitch invite. I’ll let you know what I think at a later time.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:32 am
I’m equally interested in finding out what suite of apps they used to create that screencast. Very well done. Anyone know?
July 1st, 2007 at 10:58 am
hi colin,
would it be possible to forward me a skitch invite??
all the best from the uk,
mark
July 18th, 2007 at 7:13 am
[...] everyone always seems amazed. This trick was told to me by Cris Pearson of plasq when he first showed me Skitch in San [...]
July 23rd, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Great writeup Colin. For anyone that needs one, I have Skitch invites to hand out. Just email me… brian plasq dot com
September 15th, 2007 at 12:46 am
I really like Skitch! Thanks for the invite! Anyway, I have 2 invites to give away.
http://www.thesecondpress.com/blog/2007/09/14/giveaway-skitch-invites/