Skitch: Snap, Draw, Share!

The irony of being an artist: while we freely experiment with conceptual approaches to our ideas, we tend to bond so deeply with our workflow tools we will overlook new tools that might change our workflow consequently changing our work.

For that reason, it is deeply rewarding for me to read David Alison’s column. He entertains all apps he stumbles across candidly, unburdened by old school mac snobbery. It is because of him I found Pixelmator.

And because of him, I found Skitch.

I probably spend 25% of any paying job creating tutorials for the end user, another 25% grabbing screenshots of the work-in-progress to send off for approval. So it is vital that my screengrabber be versatile, fast- loading and easy to use.

GRAB, mac’s native screen capture uitility, will only save to tiff files, requiring that I open the screenshot in an image editor. The only advantage to this app is the timed screen grab, a 10 second delay that allows the capture of  drop down menus when documenting program details for a tutorial. For the last year, Imagewell has been my go-to-app for screen capture and annotating but i find the size claustrophic at time.

Enter Skitch.

 

 

The webpost function is what is so impressive. Join Skitch.com and you can automatically upload the resulting images, you can edit the image and "reskitch". You can also add your flickr account, .mac, or ftp. 

Catch my Skitch uploads at http://skitch.com/madbadcatgraphics/

plasq even created a video for those people unwillling to read the instructions (like me)

App after app, plasq delivers amazing and whimsical products. Kudos, dudes!