The Little Skitch That Could
A friend of mine gave me am invite to the Beta of a little program called Skitch. According to the site, Skitch “is an amazingly fun and super useful. Everyday we all share images, ideas and have fun with friends online — this should be easy… right!?” As a user of Photoshop and rather expectant of high quality in my imagery, I was a little unsure if this program would be useful to me. Well, I was certainly proved wrong!
The first mistake I made in thinking about this program was its intended usage. It isn’t made to be a high-end, professional image manipulation program such as Photoshop (CS3 Extended!^^ tee hee). Rather, it is aimed at streamlining a process of capturing something you see online, adding comments (or not), uploading and sharing. In this one program, I can do the same task in a minute or two that it would have taken me several minutes in photoshop / cyberduck. In addition, the tool to upload in Skitch provides you with a URL that is copied to the clipboard by clicking the same button (the upload button) after the upload is complete so it is super quick to send the image with a friend. Also, did I mention you can set it to upload to any server? There can be some issues and it isn’t exactly the clearest to understand, but once it works, it is amazing. Truly one of my favorite features.
Skitch only saves the file when you make usage of it; aka uploading, dragging to somewhere or if you save it “to history.”
It also has a very light image browsing application built in that works well. If i had one complaint about the image browsing part, it would be that the size of the previews is often too small and I’d rather like to see the picture larger.
In the photo manipulation part, Skitch only has a few options, but they are sufficient for about 90% of all quick-turnaround tasks. Examples are crop, resize, erase, add text, fill, draw circle, draw box, draw line, pencil tool, arrow tool and selector tool. All the elements added to the stage exist by themselves in vector format, so it is easy to move around and re-color anything you add. I wish there were more options in terms of fonts, but for the purpose of this program, the one provided works well (and is perfect for, dare I say, lolcats). Also, I wish one had more control over the arrows in terms of adding curves and perhaps midway points. Finally, I really wish there were a rotate option to allow one to turn text or arrows that need to be turned to be placed properly.
All in all, Skitch is an extremely useful little program (it loads fast too!) and I’ve been using it more than I expected. It is still only in beta, so hopefully some of the issues I mentioned above will get resolved by the time the full release rolls around, but I must say I’ve been quite impressed with it. Now I too can make lolcats with the touch of a mouse.
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my invite. let me show you them.
For you mac peoples out there, I have one invite left (you get two when you sign up). If you are interested, drop me a note and I’ll send one your way.
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Commented out^^ When I get some more invites, I’ll offer them up.
