Skitching away

Thanks to David I got an invitation to Skitch, the new all-in-one screengrabber, and so far I’m having some mixed feeling about it …


If you don’t know Skitch, it’s a quite intuitive screengrabber combined with a lightweight image editor and a straight integration into web frontends (think .Mac, Flickr etc.) in order to share screenshots or images in general with the world developed by plasq. Currently it’s in private beta and you need to get an invitation to (1) be able to download it and (2) to be able to use their sharing site mySkitch.com.

That said it offers nothing that you couldn’t also get done with a half-way decent image editor and perhaps some custom scripts, but Skitch simply does the whole combination of creating, editing and sharing screenshots so well, that after just a few minutes you wish you could write a tutorial on some GUI-heavy app every minute :D It’s just far easier to mark certain areas in a screenshot and add some notes in Skitch (which you can keep running in the background) compared to opening something like Photoshop or GIMP and doing the same thing there.

But if it’s all sooooo awesome, why the mixed feelings? First of all: It’s in beta for a reason. For example: There seems to be currently no way to interact with Skitch other than using the GUI. So no AppleScript support, no scripting support from within Skitch (in order to trigger actions when you make a screenshot). Another problem is, that Skitch doesn’t apply the system’s proxy settings when communicating with the world (except for checking for updates), which is huuuuge bummer for me. So currently this means, that I can’t use the sharing aspects of Skitch while being at home. I really hope any of these two problems is fixed soon (since solving problem #1 would also more or less solve #2 for me thanks to the shell-compatibility of AppleScript ;-)).

It’s also not yet determined, how much Skitch will eventually cost once it leaves the private beta. So far I’d guess Plasq will first of all charge for the hosting of the images, so perhaps they will opt for a system comparable to what NewsGator does with their online service subscription that entitles you to updates of NetNewsWire.