Skitch, which sounds a lot like how Rolf Harris might pronounce Sketch, is an awesome beta-release screen capture and annotation tool for the Mac. Which makes it sound a lot less fun and exciting than it actually is.
As someone who takes a whole lot of screen captures I’ve put a fair few programs through their paces, but Skitch has just booted them all into the gutter. Which is great news for me, because I finally have no reason to keep using the overpriced pile of manure that is Snapz Pro. I had let this bug-ridden bloatware hang around even though I had switched to the far superior iShowU for video capture. But now that I will no longer be needing it for stills, it is getting uninstalled today.
What makes Skitch so special?
In a word, usability.In terms of basic features there isn’t a lot to separate it from other contenders, like FlySketch. But it is the way that these features seamlessly hang together, just like the developer Plasq’s last piece of award winning software Comic Life, that really make Skitch shine.
From one of the most intuitive, easy to use interfaces I have experienced in a long time you can:
• Grab pics right from your webcam
• Quickly, easily take fullscreen or partial screen grabs
• Add cool looking text, freehand annotation, shapes, gorgeous chunky arrows and colour fills
right over your image
• Crop and zoom with amazing ease
• Upload straight to your Flickr, .mac, FTP, or a supplied MySkitch web account
• Edit your existing pics from iPhoto/Aperture
• Quickly whizz through archives of your captures• Customize the look and feel of Skitch, which
will sit in your dock, menu bar or both
None of this really captures how relentlessly cool this app is and I can’t recommend it enough. Everything, from cropping to dragging and dropping your capture right into your blog editor is insanely intuitive. I never thought I would be excited about a screen capture tool, but there you go…
Check out this video from the Plasq people to give yourself a better idea:
If you want some of this sweet, sweet candy I have two invites left to the currently closed Beta. Drop me a line in the comments and they are yours.
UPDATE - wow, you can use it to resize your pictures too. Another application bites the dust from my burgeoning collection. W00t
2 Comments
I absolutely love it! What a pity I still don’t have a Mac
I am working on web pages free of charge for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. We host golf tournaments to raise funds for breast cancer research. See my current page for our current tournament. http://www.playforpinkillinois.org
I need to annotate my web images…JPEG…with text and arrows, circles. lines, etc. SNAP Z Pro doesn’t do it, native Mac Book Pro only allows PDF annotation…very limited. GIMP doesn’t do it.
I’m in a bind. Can I get one of the two remaining Beta licenses to try this. I’ll be glad to give you feedback on the product.
I need this software today. I need to finish over the weekend. Can you help out. I’m willing to pay for it if it’s not too much. We could help each other here…It would also be a great way for your firm to help out the 208,000 women who will get breast cancer this year.
Thank you.
Gordon L Campbell