As a blogger and IT professional I often need to make screenshots for things like showing a program window, instructing where to find an obscure setting, or making a witty LOLcat. Thankfully, Skitch is available to fill this need and make my screenshot tasks quick and painless.

I didn't know about Skitch until it was released in public beta early this year. I downloaded the Mac-only client, installed it, and got myself a skitch.com account for easy uploading of my screenshots. Within seconds I was able to capture the entire screen (or a selection) and mark it up with arrows, text, boxes, and circles.

The key feature for me though is the ease with which I'm able to upload the screenshots and share them with others. Using the Skitch web account, I'm able to store my screenshots (for free) and get links to the direct picture file, forum/embed HTML, and a dedicated page that allows commenting on the screenshot. The screenshots can also be uploaded to a WebDAV server, Flickr, or FTP.

Used to be desktop applications were essential to getting the job done, whatever the job may have been, large or small. Now, with all the nimble web apps to choose from, the idea of firing up a huge application for a small task seems almost, well, unproductive and wasteful.

Yeah, sure, no one is suggesting you do away with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quickbooks and other heavy hitters. However, there are excellent tools on the web where less, in many ways, is actually more. Here are 10 of my favorites.

1. ScribeFire - essential Firefox add-on for bloggers. Allows you to to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into your blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.

2. Firefox - great web browser whose charm lies in all those irresistible add ons that make the whole interwebs experience that much sweeter. Once you pimp out your Firefox, it seriously is difficult to function on anything else. Yes, there are the crashes and other peccadillos, but they're easy enough to overlook especially if you are truly in love.

3. Skitch - this is the best, quick image editor and photo sharing web app that is dead simple to use. For quick screenshots and sharing photos, you cannot beat it. For Mac only though. Sorry.

4. Gmail - I've done away with Outlook and Mail and rely on Gmail for several reasons: free, 7090 MB capacity, integration with Google calendar, Gtalk, great search functionality, and the portability is sweet.

5. Google Reader - free, powerful feed reader which allows you to share items with your friends and slog through all your news feeds as fast as your bleary eyes will let you. Bonus - I'm playing with Feedly (Firefox extension) which provides a magazine like start page of your feeds with complete Google Reader integration and Twitter and FriendFeed and more. So far I like, but Google Reader is still number one for now.

As a part of the MacWorld celebrations, Skitch has announced that they are opening up and releasing a beta for the general public. As covered before, Skitch is a rockin' screen capture application for the Mac. You can easily capture all or just a portion of your screen, do some quick editing, and easily share it with your peeps via Flickr, FTP, or Skitch's on web service.

We promise, once you start using this app you'll wonder how you adequately did screen captures before. If you're a blogger, techie, or artist you'll love this functional (and beautiful) app. In addition to doing normal screen captures, you can use your built-in iSight to snap a photo of your self, sketch out a quick drawing, and access your iPhoto library for easy photo sharing. Skitch also makes annotating images real easy with attractive text and image editing capabilities.

To get started with Skitch, head on over to their homepage and download the install file.

[via TUAW]

If you're one of the lucky ducks participating in the beta release of Skitch, the super-cool "anyone can be an artist" photo editing tool, then be sure to download the newest update by firing up the app and choosing "check for updates" from the Skitch menu.

Released today, Skitch Beta 4 now:

• supports TIFF files

• sports improved help windows

• offers better snap crosshair visibility on dark backgrounds

• ensures images taken with Cam Snap are now automatically flipped to compensate for mirroring

• allows users to adjust arrow heads in the preference pane (yay!)

• has an improved launch screen

• offers a whole lot of other fixes, tweaks, and great things.

Not a Skitch user yet? Don't worry, it will be out, um, well, the team isn't really sure yet. But trust us, it's worth the wait.

So far in our invite-a-palooza, we've given away over 500 invites to web services that everyone is clamouring to join. Today, however, we've got a slightly different one.

Day 7: Skitch
Back in June, we took a look at Skitch - the utterly brilliant screenshot and annotation app from the folks behind Comic Life. The Mac users amongst the team here at Download Squad swear by Skitch (and the accompanying mySkitch website) - and we're not alone. Screenshots, annotations, web uploading (including Flickr support) and more make this a must-have amongst Mac users taking screengrabs. If you're on a Mac, and dying to get your hands on a Skitch beta, all you need to do is comment below, and be sure to activate your comment! Whilst there's currently no word on what the final product will cost once out of beta, Windows users will be pleased to hear that there's talk of a Windows version.

If you know of another site or service you'd like us to consider for the Invite-a-palooza, drop us a note.

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]