Colourmod is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X that you’ll end up using much more than you think you would. I’m not a designer but as someone who fiddles around on the web I find myself in need of a hexadecimal color code from time-to-time. And when I do, I use Colourmod.

There are a few ways that I find myself using Colourmod to find the color I’m looking for. The first, and perhaps most obvious way, is to drag the “blue dot” color picker around the main color well and find the color I want making subtle adjustments by using the slider. The second, is to manually enter in the hexadecimal color code that I’m currently tweaking and make small changes until I get exactly what I want.

One nice feature is the blue arrow that will quickly copy the current color code and place that value into your clipboard. This makes finding, selecting and copying a color code into your text editor very, very quick.

Feature suggestions? Sure. One thing I’d like to see is a single text area that gives the proper RGB color values for a color. Although Colourmod supplies these values they aren’t easily selected. I’d also like to see a much easier and more accurate way to use the color picker. It is very tough to make small changes especially to light gray colors.

Oh, and I’d ditch the ‘U’ in Colourmod. But that’s just me.

Oh, and you saw the teaser trailer, right?

/via Coudal Partners.

One of the distinct features in the Path app is the fly-out menu that allows you to share photos, comments, location, etc. Two developers took it upon themselves to build out that menu both in CSS3 and using CoreAnimation. Both open sourced their work and gave credit.

• Path menu in pure CSS 3 by Victor Coulon.
• Path menu using CoreAnimation by ??? (Levy)

/via Mike Rundle on Twitter.

There is a lot of talent inside of Microsoft. It is everything that happens above the talent that inhibits that talent’s ability to make really great things.

While the Arc Touch Mouse is very, very interesting and seemingly well done it is still based off an old “mouse” (read: move around your desk and move the pointer) paradigm. The multitouch touchpad from Apple is, in my opinion, much better and more forward-thinking because it is getting us closer and closer to having all touch-based interfaces for our computing devices. It is why I switched from using a mouse. I never want a mouse again.

I don’t want to take anything away from the people that worked on this mouse at Microsoft… but I’d like to know if Microsoft would have let them work as hard and long on creating a next generation touch device rather than only a slimmer mouse. And then actually be able to ship it.

I was never much a fan of Steve Jobs. I was always so much more a fan of the company he had built and the products they created.

His idea of thinking differently was to not follow the trends but to set them. The age of computers was, directly or indirectly, crafted by Steve Jobs and his team. Although he is, deservedly so, getting a lot of credit for the revolutionary products Apple has built over the years he wasn’t alone. Apple’s 21,000+ member team all worked in concert to design, manufacturer, market, sell, and support these incredible products. The part that Steve brought – at least from my perspective in the cheap-seats here, was the drive for perfection at the expense of features.

It wasn’t until this last two decades that his methods truly proved themselves to the world and paid off for him. Although Apple saw success in the early days those that would try to copy that which Apple built would be the true benefactors for years. That is, until Steve Jobs stopped being a one-man-team and filled his entire company with people that shared his principles and learned his methods.

Apple products notoriously do less than people want when they’re first shipped. But, no one can ever say that they aren’t beautiful, work exactly as they say, and are the best products they own. Of all the things I own I can say that it is only Apple products that I have a strong affinity for. No other company has captured me as a lifelong loyal consumer of their products. Yet.

I can say that Steve Jobs has had an affect on my life. His passion for perfection at the expense of features has taught me that you don’t have to be first, your product doesn’t have to be for everyone, and your products don’t have to have every feature in order to succeed. Taking your time and building something “insanely great” can pay off. His experiences have also taught me that no matter how great you are you’re only as strong as the team around you. No one man (or woman) can expect to accomplish anything great in our field without the help of people that are talented, driven, and willing to think different. For me those are his legacies; the pursuit of perfection at the expense of features and understanding it takes a team of people willing to think different.

Don’t just do what everyone else is doing, think different.

“Eventually, I (well, many of us) decided that better native clients (OSX, Windows, Linux, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc) was the best way to grow GitHub.”

Boom.

If only these guys did the packaging for, well, everything.

Recently Drew wrote up the backstory to how this all happened and it is a fantastic read.

Be sure to check out their other products. Thanks Icon Dock.

/via David Kaneda.

/via Evan Williams on Twitter.

Last weekend I rolled out an updated theme for this site when your browsing it with an iPhone. The main reason for this is my mobile photos. When I post a mobile photo my site automatically Twitter’s a link to it, like this, and a lot of people flood in to view the photos and some of them are on iPhones. I wanted this site to load a lot faster than it did before for these mobile photo pages and this definitely solves that problem.

However, another reason to do this theme came up last weekend. Someone asked me about fishing, particularly this fairly large bass that I caught this summer, and I had trouble, on my own iPhone, on my own site, to find that photo. Turns out I hadn’t posted it yet! It was taking forever to search the site and I got fed up with it. But, now I’ll be able to find stuff quickly given that this new theme works site-wide and has a really great search option right at the top.

Those of you without iPhones may be wondering where your theme for this site is? It is coming. I’ll be working to add all Webkit enabled mobile browsers first (e.g. DROID) this weekend and then will be moving onto other mobile browsers until I squash the majority of them.

Happy mobile browsing.

At first it was all about how to get the bits from here to there. Then it was how to link them together and to navigate through them. Then it was about adding media. Next came display ports and fitting well-designed information on them using both text and rich media together. The next big challenge was bandwidth – using it efficiently, increasing it, and making it affordable. And on and on the challenges came and went.

The next challenge for Web designers, according to Jason Santa Maria‘s article on A List Apart titled On Web Typography, will be choosing font faces. Until somewhat recently a Web designer would have to go through some technical fire-circles to use font faces outside of the normal ‘system fonts’ that come standard on every computer in the world. Due to the limited choices, designers haven’t had too much of a challenge about what font to use where.

Not anymore.

Web designers, according to Jason, are going to have to dive into Typography like never before. They will need to learn what font faces go well together, how many to use, how to use weight and selection to invoke certain emotions, etc. He lays out some really great rules to follow in the article but even he admits that his rules are breakable. His point is, roll up your sleeves and be prepared to work hard at this.

Two things excite me about the future of Tyography on the Web. The first is that we’re going to see an explosion of Web sites that incorporate font faces that we haven’t really seen on our screens. You know that feeling you get when you see a really well designed poster, magazine, book, manual, or anything else that is printed thesedays? You’re about to have those same feelings when you look at Web sites. The second is that old school designers, those that got ink on their hands when they started their career, are now the guys that know more than the new guys. The technical hurdles for using non-standard font faces on Web sites have been removed and the creative juices can now begin to flow from even the most non-technical designers. The field is wide open.

In a word, the world of type on the Web is getting interesting.

It is summer and that means its time to reach under the bed, pull out the boxes full of shorts, tee shirts, snorkeling equipment, and frisbees. Time to get away from the TV and computer screens, get outside and enjoy the sun.

That same spirit is what spurred me to give this site a slight refresh. It isn’t all about color and the photo on top either. There are literally hundreds of small edits that I’ve made (which I’m very happy with). Changes to note is the new mobile photos page, the way mobile photos display, and the home page showing the latest photos from both the mobile photos and photos categories.

I’m not going to enumerate all of the changes here. I’m going to eat my own dog food and go fishing instead.

Mike Rundle, whom I had the extreme pleasure of working with at 9rules, is – and I have absolutely no reservations about saying this out loud – one of the very best designers I will ever work with. He also doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty with regards to programming. And he’s done just that with Beak – his foray into developing software for the Macintosh (which is, I think, exactly what he should be doing).

Beak is a simple, yet relatively full-featured Twitter application for the Macintosh that has Mike’s visual tastes dripping all over it. The icons in the application, as an example, could be picked out as Mike’s work from a hundred yards.

One of the differentiators that Beak has going for it, over any of the other Twitter applications I’ve used for the Mac, is the “Stats” tab. Mike chose to use the URL shortener Idek.net, which has a nice, clean, simple API, that allows him to show the number of click thrus on a URL that you’ve shortened from within Beak itself. I think this is both genius and handy. While Tweetie supports all of the URL shortening services I could ever want (and photo posting services too), it doesn’t support showing the statistics of those clicks nor does it even connect me to my account on said URL shorteners (neither does Beak, but at least I can easily check the stats tab).

There are several other nits that Mike has, no doubt pain stakingly [sic], poured over, refined, and included in the first version of this application. Profile pop-up boxes, in-line replies and retweets, and support for multiple accounts all seem like things that someone who was taking the easy way would have left out.

This is still “beta” software people. But I’m very much looking forward to what Mike ends up with before hitting 1.0 and even more looking forward to seeing what he does for his next trick in the world of Mac applications.

Jeffrey Veen, a co-founder of Adaptive Path and Measure Map (which was acquired by Google before it even went Beta) and who is now a principal at Small Batch, Inc., gives a great presentation on Designing for Big Data. I’m linking to this for several reasons.

1. Jeff Veen is the man.
2. The presentation he gave was great.
3. The video is very well put together.
4. Because this is my blog and I can cry, I mean link to what I want to.

So, if you’re so inclined – enjoy Jeff’s presentation and learn something.

One thing I did like was that when the update was announced, they had taken steps to make sure that everyone’s feed subscription didn’t go stale. However, I don’t like that both elise.com/recipes and SimplyRecipes.com are one in the same. One should forward to the other. Google doesn’t like duplicate URLs (no matter what Jesse her web guy told her).

That’d be my only suggestion.

The reason I’m linking to this site, though, is really that I’ve been using Simply Recipes to find excellent recipes for a long time and I thought I’d throw it into my suggested tag.

Source: Simply Recipes.

What I appreciate the most about Jesse’s tutorial is the step-by-step detail that is given. A lot of tutorials, that I’ve come across for similar things, are a mess of screenshots with captions as instructions. I like this balance better.

Source: Texture Tutorial 01 – Seamless Grunge Textures.

There was a noticeable lull in the quality of the designs in late 2007 – early 2008. I don’t know how long it lasted exactly but it is no longer an issue. Threadless has done what they’ve needed to do (incentivize the community through rewards, interaction, and a heckuva Web site) to bring the quality back up to, and perhaps beyond, where it was.

Here are a few shirts that I’ve enjoyed in recent months that I fully plan on getting my hands on.

   

 

Don’t feel bad if you want to pick up one of these shirts for yourself. They’re amazing. The first four are actually up for design of the year! If you do, purchase one of these shirts that is, I’ll earn a few credits to pick up one or more of them at a reduced price – so by all means buy buy buy!

Do you have any favorite shirts or prints at Threadless? What about other sites?

Some of the more interesting and notable revisions are that there are completely new visual styles throughout, new toolbar icons for every application, and much more.

Related: The very same day of the iWork ’09 announcement Sebastiaan released an iWork icon goodie set.

Source: iWork / iLife ’09 UI Roundup.

There are 3 subtle changes that have been made to the Keynote icon in iWork ’09. I thought for the sake of, oh I don’t know, fun? that I’d point them out here in a side-by-side comparison. If you find any other differences between these two icons, feel free to share them.

1. The entire icon, particularly the lectern’s wood grain, has a slightly darker appearance.
2. The date on the speech notes has changed to “Q1 2009″, obviously.
3. Although very subtle, the clarity of the paragraph text, has been increased.

The compression of the JPG  graphic above doesn’t make it very easy to see these subtle differences. But, you can easily see these differences yourself when you download and install iWork ’09 since the new version installs into a new directory leaving the old applications intact.

When I switched to this theme in April of this year I had created two header images that would display at random on each page refresh. I had aspirations “to some day find the time to have as many as ten random header images”. Later that month I had 10 total header images. As of today I have created about 40 header images for this site, 24 of which are active.

In August of this year, after visiting a Peter Lik gallery in Las Vegas, I had decided to spruce up the random header images on this site by also changing the color of the background, or frame, of the site based on the image being displayed. This added a lot of fun to creating the images for me and I hope that as people found this site they too enjoyed the display of them.

As of today, however, we’re kicking it up a notch.

The first update that I made is that now the link color also changes when the header image and background color do. This small adjustment makes it feel just a little bit more refined then just changing the background color. Some of the background colors I had originally chosen were a little too light to read on white. So I had to make a few small adjustments to the color choices I made. This has two interesting side effects the first being that I now have 4 or 5 brand new “looks” for this site. Just by making a new color choice for each. The other side effect is that I now have to choose colors that are readable on white. For better or worse, I’m not sure yet.

The second update is one I’m really excited to talk about because I have yet to see how it will effect the site overall. The headers are no longer totally random. The way it worked prior to today was that when the page loaded I allowed PHP ((The programming language this site is written in.)) to choose a random number between 1 and 24 – and I’d use that number to determine the header image to show. It was incredibly simple, worked well, and made for each refresh to be a surprise!

In an effort to make the selection of which header image to show a smarter process I’ve added two layers of complexity to how a header image is chosen in addition to the random selection. This might get confusing, if it does, sorry.

If you visit the home page of the site, or any sub-page like the about page, it will figure out what time of day it is ((Here in the eastern United States.)) and display one of many images I’ve designated for that time of day. I have images categorized as morning, day, evening, and night. I’ve split up the hours using the 24-hour clock this way; 6am-12pm = morning, 12pm-5pm = day, 5pm-9pm = evening, 9pm-6am = night.  I may adjust those time slots but that is where they are now. I have several images for each time of day. So on these pages you will still be getting a randomly selected header, but it will be randomly selected based on the current time of day, rather than from the entire pool.

If you visit a note, photo, mobile photo, etc. on this site you will be shown an image contextually. What I mean is that for each header image I have associated a tag to it. The tag may describe what is in the image, where the image was taken, or something the image has to do with. I then compare the tags that are associated to the post you’re currently reading and create a list of matching headers.  If there are one or more matches the site randomly displays one of those matches.  If there are no matches the site reverts to the time of day method.

So what does this all mean? Well, I’m not sure yet as the system still has some randomness to it. But generally speaking, if you are reading a post about my trip to Hawai’i, like this one, or this one, you should see a header related to Hawai’i. If you are reading a post about animals, you’ll see a header that probably has animals in it. If you are watching a video about food, then a header relating to food will most likely be displayed. And, again, if you are reading about New York City or Philadelphia - those headers will show up.

I’m still fine tuning the way that the site decides which header best fits the current post being shown but so far in my testing it has done a pretty good job.

As I was going through my photos from Las Vegas, which I’m still not done publishing yet, I thought of framing them the way Peter Lik does.  Peter Lik’s framing work is what makes his work so great.  If he has a photo of bamboo from South East Asia, he actually uses bamboo to frame the over-sized photo. If you’ve never been to a Peter Lik gallery, and you’re a photo nut, please do yourself a favor and drop in.

Then I had a thought. If I’m going to turn some of these photos into header images for my site, why not “frame” them the way Peter Lik would.  I can’t, without a lot of work, wrap my site in bamboo shoots. But I can, at the very least, change the background color of my site to “frame” the header.

So that is what I’ve now done.  Refresh this or any page of my site to see some of the color / photo combinations I have so far.  As of this writing there are 15 combinations ((As soon as I can I will create a page for you to be able to view them all without the need of refreshing so often.)).

Oh, as an aside: By removing that old paper bag background I also slimmed my page load time quite a lot. So there is a double-benefit!  I think the paper bag background was around 214Kb.

Brand New is a blog that covers the world of corporate and brand identity as it relates to work that has been recently released.  This blog is refreshing since it doesn’t look into the past, as many other blogs are doing so well already, but looks towards the future of these brands with their very latest iterations of identity.

Some of my favorite recent posts include: Popeyes Gets Jazzy, Philips gets a Nip/Tuck, and A Leaf grows in New Jersey.  There are several others that are definitely worth a look.

Source: Brand New.

Especially on today’s Internet. I’ve had “my own site” for as long as I’ve ever been online. It all started on some Geocities and Tripod powered sites in the mid-90s. Then, when I switched from using AOL  (read: When I finally realized AOL was not the Internet.), I used some shared space on Prodigy.net, my ISP at the time. It wasn’t long before I discovered the world of Web development and purchased a domain (then called colinspage.com) for around $70 per year.

Fast forward about a year and a few of my friends put together a Star Wars related news site called thehutt.net. I didn’t help out too much with the design and development but I did write some for the site.  It wasn’t long after that when I wanted to scratch my own itch and had my own blog.  Which ended up turning towards theubergeeks.net, and now I have cdevroe.com.

I think having your own Web site is a valuable thing, especially for those of us that work on the Web.  It helps you stay in touch with what people are going through when they want to publish content online, edit some code, or even customize an open source project.  There are countless lessons to be learned by having your own site to fiddle with.

Great work Kyle. I’ll check in on you and your site(s) in 14 years.

Source: Kyle Slattery.com.

Maybe you tilt the jar and shoving a knife all the way to the bottom, which usually ends up getting more peanut button on the knife handle than the tip.  What about using a spoon?  Then you usually have to use your finger to get it off of the spoon.  There is almost always some peanut butter wasted.  Maybe you have another method altogether (which I’d love to hear about).

But you may no longer need that method – that is, if Sherwood Forlee has anything to say about it. They’ve put together a new design for a peanut butter jar that opens from both ends.

Source: skforlee – easy pb&j.
Via: Coudal Partners: New Peanut Butter Jar Please. 

Some of the project, like the Palace of Soviets, are monumental in scale. Gorgeous stuff throughout.

Source: The Architecture of Moscow from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Unrealised [sic] projects..

The winner, Matthew Dent – graphic designer now based in London, had designed each coin in such a way that when lined up properly (pictured) the coins would display the Royal Arms.

Brilliant.

I also appreciate the tag-line on their front page: “Your Change is Changing”.

(Source: The New Designs Revealed)
[Via Coudal Partners, Jason Kottke, and We Made This]

Let me preface these screenshots by saying I am not a designer. You have been warned.

From past to present

Here are some of the designs that I created for this site, some of them made it, some of them didn’t, over the last few years. If, for some reason you are crazy, you want the Photoshop document for any of these you may have them free of charge.

Circa March 2006

This one never made it, at least in the way we see it here, to the public site. But a version of it did end up making it to the live site and ran here for at least a few months.

Circa April 2006

Nothing of this design ended up here on the site. The thing I notice the most about this was that it wasn’t a particularly wide design, so I was obviously still on my iBook. It is funny how, unless you are a professional designer, you tend to design for yourself before others. Professional designers are put to the task of doing just the opposite.

Circa May 2006

Thank heavens this never made it live! Oh, and I’m beginning to notice how the diet had an affect on each of these designs. This design was from only one month after I started my diet, so I was still using photos of myself from when I was 35-40 pounds overweight.

The only redeeming quality, I think, about the direction I started to go with this design was that I starting to get away from the solid white background. But, alas, I never published this version.

Circa June 2006

I can’t believe I was pumping out crappy unfinished designs every single month in 2006. This was obviously a variation of April’s attempt, and included both the Rebel Alliance logo and the numbers from LOST. Nice.

Circa July 2006

This design was the beginning of a design that I ended up using in October 2006, which you’ll see below. This was when I began to really think about how blogs, by their very nature, didn’t do a very good job at “advertising” older content. It seemed like older blog posts became stale, Google bait, and so were a lot less valuable long term. So I created this quick and simple way, by using some photography, to link to older posts.

Circa September 2006

This is where I began to combine my ideas for featuring content and also using “natural language navigation” in addition to the normal navigation menus in the header. The next version of this site will actually incorporate the navigation ideals from this design, in some form, and I’m looking forward to finally bringing this out.

Something else I’m noticing is that in September 2006 I was still using my middle initial on the Internet. I’ll have to do some serious digging to see when it was that I finally realized I wanted to drop the D. and just use my first and last name online.

Circa October 2006

As we saw back in April 2006 I had created the foundation for what became this theme. This was actually a pretty good version of the site, in my opinion, as it had many of the things I really wanted to pull off. It may not be as aesthetically pleasing as I would like, but I’m not very talented in that area. But this version definitely made it easy to publish content the way that I wanted to. Something I’m slowly working my way back to now.

Circa October 2006

I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish with this design. Though looking back I do like the direction I was going with the footer here using natural language navigation. Everything else is pretty horrible, which is probably why I never even completed the mock up, let alone put it live on the site.

Circa May 2007

Pushing out in the the simple and artistic side of myself, I began to try to put together a header that would better show that I wasn’t tied to only a two-color, boring design. This mock up only shows the simple header but, where this layout began to excel was how it handled navigation. I think I ended up scrapping it because completing all of the JavaScript needed to pull it off became pretty daunting at the time.

Circa November 2007

In November of last year I began to scramble. I was desperate to get something different up here on my site and so I began to experiment in Photoshop a lot. This was one version where I just went crazy and tried to do something completely different than what I have ever tried here.

Here is another one.

Circa November 2007

This mock up, which took me about 5 minutes to throw together, needs no other explanation than to say: I probably drank a lot that night. I had began to think that maybe I should come out with something totally “weird” and in that way it’d be original and thought provoking. Well, the only thought this design provokes is of crap.

Circa November 2007

And now we get to what is now the current design of the site. It has had a few iterations since I installed this theme in October/November of 2007, but for the most part this theme has served me really well.

I really should have kept a gallery of screenshots of this site up-to-date every time I made a little change. Oh well, I think I will from now on.

Circa December 2007

Another reach, here I decided to return to something close to October 2006′s design, one that I thought that worked pretty well – while changing around the colors and adding a few new elements into the mix. This “remix” never sat well and so I didn’t complete the mock up.

Are you still here? Wow. We’re almost done, I promise.

Circa December 2007

This was another “few minutes in Photoshop” wasted. Sometimes I feel inspired and so I quickly open Photoshop to see if I can mock up the thought in my head. I remember, pretty clearly, having a great idea on this day on how best to pull off something – and then I completely lost it when I was getting everything setup in Photoshop – and so out came something completely horrible.

Circa March 2008

So here is my first redesign attempt last month that I ended up scrapping. After mocking this up, I decided to go a completely different direction rather suddenly and so I simple dropped this design. This design is actually pretty “ok”. It is simple, does that it needs to, and not much that it doesn’t. But I decided that it was a little “too much” for what I want to accomplish with the next version of my site.

That was fun, wasn’t it? A look back in time to hopefully learn from and do better in the future. I think the idea of “it isn’t always what we do, but what we choose not to do, that makes us great” definitely applies here. Although my site’s design hasn’t always been very nice, I can say that I’m happy that I never put up some of these designs.

So what’s next?

Well, you’ll just have to wait and see, but I will say that I’m going to be going much more simple with the next design. Sort of like a Tumblr type design, with some added flare for the various portions of this site that are highly customized.

Essentially over the last few months I’ve been building a personal content publishing platform with WordPress, now at version 2.5, as the foundation. I’m really excited to see what the future of this site looks like, and hope that everyone enjoys it.

Note: Skitch, which is one of my most favorite applications/services of all time, made this post not only possible but really easy and affordable to pull off. Thanks to the plasq team for such a great product.

(Source: “C4[1] Sasser: Coda Confidential”)

What reminded me of this was that this morning I saw a tweet by Steven Frank, of Panic, which read: “I’m bugged by “Remember me” checkboxes. I’d rather stay cookied and just log out of my desktop OS account. Or use the site logout button.”.

I think this is a relatively minor issue since the person logging in only needs to decide whether to check a single box or not – but it may be something that we could remove from our layouts altogether.

What do you think? Do you feel this ‘feature’ is imperative or, at this point, not as needed?

My personal opinion is that it isn’t needed because more often than not I want the site to set a cookie so that I stay logged in. But I use a laptop and bring it with me nearly everywhere I go. So for me, this is a matter of convenience not of security. Others may bounce from cafe to cafe, college computer lab to computer lab, and will view this much more as a security issue – and probably feel differently than I do.

Thoughts?

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!