“With creative features rivaling ‘Pro’ applications, while retaining plasq’s signature ease-of-use, Comic Life Magiq is a Quantum Evolution of Comic Life.”

I’m downloading the trial right now to give it a spin.  I’m fairly confident Eliza would like to get her hands on Comic Life Magiq to create some really neat photo projects.

Video demonstration of Comic Life Magiq

Source: Comic Life Magiq.
Related:  Other posts tagged with plasq.

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.

Update at 11:34am EST: plasq is planning a full scale release of Skitch in a matter of hours. Until then, read below.

Update at 5:10pm EST: Ladies and Gentlemen: Skitch. May she treat you as well as she has treated me.

Update at 5:40pm EST: plasq is getting signups like crazy!! They won’t be able to get through them all very quickly and I still have 20 something invites left. So hurry up!!

Update at 10:12pm EST: I get off for a few hours and this place blows up! I ended up going way over the initial set of invites I was given but the plasq team was nice enough to hook me up with plenty more. So keep the requests coming until I run dry!

Update at 10:57pm EST: I just wanted to take a moment to clear something up. To put it simply; I didn’t make Skitch. I also didn’t produce the video demo for Skitch. plasq is full of highly-dedicated and talented individuals that work very hard at creating Skitch, Comic Life, and even the video demo below. Do not mistake me for someone who had any part in Skitch. I’m simply friends with with plasq crew and a loyal Skitcher!

Update on June 16, 2007 at 11:30am EST: I wanted to let everyone know that I’m still sending out invites at a rate of about ten an hour. If you’d like one, keep the comments coming and I’ll give them out until the well runs dry. For more information about what has happened since Skitch was release; take a peak at the recap post I just published.

Update on June 21, 2007 at 10:43am EST: I’m out of invites!! Phew, that was exhausting. Well over 200 invites were sent out and many of you have taken the time to link to the Skitch page from your blog and flickr accounts. Thank you very much for participating. Enjoy!

Today Skitch is being released as a semi-public beta with a fully public beta coming soon being released in a matter of hours. Semi-public, in this case, means invite only. Prior to today you had to tie down one of the plasq crew to get an invite, but now they’ve extended that ability to those of us that have had the privilege of using Skitch over the last several months.

Would you like to try Skitch? Leave a comment on this post, send me an email, Flickr Mail, Viddler message, Twitter me, IM me – whatever just get me an email address to send the invite to, and I’ll hook you up.

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!

Overlooking Denver, Colorado

So what do you do when you’re tens of thousands of feet above the Earth, looking down at nothing but the clouds that most people are seeing above their heads? Well, I write – finally – about heading to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo.

The entire Viddler team is converging on San Francisco this weekend to meet up and prepare for a few things. The first, and admittedly most exciting thing, is the launch of the next version of Viddler’s player and web site. The second is for the Web 2.0 Expo happening at the Moscone Center Monday through Wednesday this week. And – the third is a party that Viddler is hosting with a bunch of other cool companies like Ma.gnolia, Citizen Agency, JanRain, Plasq, and Scrapblog. You can RSVP on Upcoming. Lots to prepare for, lots to do, lots of excitement.

I find the “dead” time of being on a plane the perfect time to try to catch up on writing, so hopefully I’ll be able to pump out a few posts on here over the next few days.

I’m looking forward to meeting up with some of my west coast contacts, if there is time, and really looking forward to finally meeting the rest of team Viddler. I’m also hoping to be able to see at least a small portion of San Francisco (weather and time permitting) before I head back – since this is the first time I’ve been in the city.

If you’re going to be in San Francisco over the next week or so and would like to say hi – send me an email or message on Viddler – or just find me.

[tags]web2expo, san francisco, california, on-plane, ma.gnolia, plasq, viddler, citizen agency, scrapblog, janrain, party, version 2.0[/tags]
[slug]going-to-sf07[/slug]