Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET.

/via CNet.

I figured I might as well look the part.  Have you talked like a pirate today?

This post is made possible by Skitch… one of my most favorite Macintosh applications.

In Tiger, when I clicked Show All I got a really nice Spotlight-only window that I could then drill down into the results more specifically.  For example, if I was searching for photos of my friend Chris Fehnel, the window in Tiger looked like this.

Tiger’s Spotlight “show all” window.

Pretty straight forward, right?  It breaks out Documents (or in this case conversations I had with Chris in iChat), Email messages, his Address Book entry, and photos that I had tagged with his name.  Brilliant!

Tiger’s Spotlight window also allowed for some sorting options on the right “panel”.  Sorting by date, kind, location of the file, etc, – is quick, easy, and straight forward.

Now, let’s take a look at Leopard’s Spotlight window when clicking Show All for a search for “Chris Fehnel”.

Leopard’s “show all” window.

I don’t even think I have to explain how bad this is.  Imagine being new to the Mac, and seeing this window.  This is horrible, unusable, and makes me wish I could downgrade to Tiger.

If anyone has any suggestions (besides Finder replacements), I’m all ears.
 

The crew over at the Iconfactory, who are the creators of Twitterrific among many other things, are doing a tribute to Indiana Jones this month.  Here is a snap of my desktop, which I took using Skitch, to see the icons and one of their desktops in action:

You too can sport such Indy awesomeness by downloading

• The Raiders of the Lost Ark icon set,
• The Indy’s Desk desktop background image.

I’m looking forward to the next three icon set installments for The Temple of Doom, The Last Crusade, and the new The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  I would have liked to see a desktop image or two for each of these movies included in the icon download.

Source: The Iconfactory presents Indiana Jones.

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.

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!