The talented developers at Plasq have released an update to their award-winning design program, Comic Life, which we've recommended. Comic Life is a comic strip creation program that allows you to choose from various background frames, dialog bubbles, and fonts to create fun, eye-catching documents. It comes in "Standard" ($24.95 US; 30-day trial is available) and "Deluxe" ($29.95 US) flavors with the "Deluxe" version offering more fonts, templates, and styles. Comic Life is available for Mac and Windows.

The version 1.4 update for Mac is free if you've previously purchased Comic Life (or had it preinstalled on Mac OS 10.4), and it is a slim 11MB download. In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, new features in the update include support for iPhoto '08 events, additional customizable image attributes (sharpness, contrast, brightness, etc.), and the ability to set imported images to their actual size. The 1.4 update for the Windows version is currently in development.

It could be the nice pink funky heart of Skitch's logo that draws you in. The heart definitely sets the tone for this sweet image editor that is fun and stupid easy to use. It is Forrest Gump easy.

They aren't kidding when they say you can learn Skitch in 3 minutes, however, you can run into some small roadblocks which can interfere with your whizzing around in the program. We'll get to those a little later.

You can use Skitch to take screen captures, crop and resize photos, draw or annotate photos, sketch, and it works with your iPhoto library.


It also keeps a history of all your Skitch images for easy retrieval. Below is a screenshot of the history menu.



With a click of a button you can post your image to mySkitch, a webservice that works with Skitch to give you 1-click uploading of images for fast and fun image sharing.


Resizing is easy. You just pull the image corners to the pixel size you want. This will work only if the "Export at Original Size" square is not checked.



Also, if you use the pull down menu and actually save your image to your hard drive, Skitch saves it as a .skitch file, which is only useful if you want to send it to another Skitch user. The easy way to save it as a jpg (or .png, .svg, .pdf) is to drag your Skitch image to the desktop.

If you like LOLCATS, Skitch is an easy way to make notes and sketch on your images.



Skitch is available by invitation only and so far, just for Mac users. Sorry PC fans. Word is there is a Windows application in development.

You can register at the plasq.com (creators of Comic Life, Pluzzle, and Sqreensavers) site and invites will be sent out via email.

If you're using Skitch, let us know what you think of it.

[via TechCrunch]