Skitch

We are visual creatures, without a doubt. We communicated using images at least 10,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic age.

With live image commenting in Skitch.com you can be at least as good as the Paleolithic cave painters and you can watch as new image comments fade into your view, critiquing your work.

Why try it? Here’s one idea…

Track Google Rank on Keywords

When you’re assessing your Google search ranking for a specific keyword, grab a screenshot and upload it to Skitch.com

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

After you upload the image, put your mouse cursor in the Description box and enter today’s date. Then add the Google query link to the description box as well. Save the Description.

Next time you want to gage your ranking on this keyword just click the link in the description.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Add a snap of the new ranking, in the comments and you can track the rank over time, visually.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

 As other people comment on your image(s)  you will see live comments appear in your image page on Skitch.com.

Yesterday we released My Twitter and My MailDrop for Skitch.com. These two new services can be found in your Skitch.com account settings.

Once you setup My Twitter and generate your My MailDrop address, you have many new ways to share your images; be they photos from your mobile phone, photos, screenshots or drawings from Skitch.app (the Skitch desktop application) or Public images on Skitch.com.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

iPhone to Skitch.com & Twitter

Capture an image with your phone camera, email the photo to Skitch.com using your special MailDrop-for-Twitter email address.The image will be posted to Skitch.com, a “tiny url” will be generated and a message will be posted to your Twitter account so all of your followers can view the image you just captured.

Elapsed time from when you saw “it” happen, to showing everyone you know what “it” looked like … 15 seconds.

Skitch.app to Skitch.com & Twitter

If you have an image in the Skitch desktop application that you want to Twitter about, you have at least two options to achieve your goal.

Option 1: Use Webpost to upload the image to your Skitch.com account.From the webpage that now hosts this image, click the “Send to Twitter” box in the right-side column. Send your message to all your followers.

Option 2:  Use the “Mail this image” function (Command-Shift-M) in Skitch.app to send the image to your email application. Address the email to your MailDrop +Twitter address. Send the email. The image will be posted to Skitch.com and a message will be automatically sent to all of your Twitter followers.

Elapsed time … 15 seconds

Using email to send images captured using any email capable device (including mobile devices, laptops and desktop computers and online webmail) is super powerful. Combine the power of email, image creation/capture devices and micro-blogging platforms like Twitter and you can communicate & collaborate with a powerful visual voice.

Have you tried these new features yet? Let us know what you think…

Ok, here we go again. plasq just announced My Twitter for Skitch.com, but we thought that since you can now Twitter using images from Skitch.com, why not make it easier to get the image into Skitch.com and Twitter at the same time? Duh.

plasq is excited to announce a very handy new feature for Skitch.com called “My MailDrop”

We suggest that you immediately log into your Skitch.com account to learn how you can send images via email directly into Skitch.com. Log in and go to your account “Settings“, then click on “My MailDrop“.

There you will be able to generate Your (unique) MailDrop Address.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Then you can send images to Skitch.com using any email client, such as:

• a mobile device (iPhone, Nokia N95, Blackberry etc.)
• a web based mail system (Gmail, Thunderbird, Hotmail etc.)
• a desktop client (Mail, Entourage, Outlook etc.)

When you send an image using email you can also explicitly set the Privacy and Sharing options for the image as well as set the Title, all with the click of the “Send” button in your email client.

For those of you who are into micro-blogging you will definitely want to setup this new feature because you can instantly share the image with people within your social groups. Including Twitter.

Of course once you have the image loaded to Skitch.com your friends might start playing with the Skitch It! button…

Ok, you know how you like to Twitter all day long?

Well, plasq is super excited to announce My Twitter. If you use Twitter you will definitely want to check out the new feature, it let’s you instantly Tweet about any public image on Skitch.com.

First,  setup your Twitter account in the Skitch.com “Settings” page.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Second, upload an image to Skitch.com, either as a public, or secret image.

Third, use the “Send to Twitter” box to send a message to your Twitter followers and the public Twitter timeline.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Why would you wait!? Check out My Twitter.

Every so often you, like most people who participate in anything on the web, need or want to collaborate with friends or co-workers using images. Why? There are many reasons…

• Creating conceptual mockups while designing a web page or site.
• Designing user interaction flow.
• Performing user support.
• Teaching children how to draw.
• Playing games like hangman.
• Iterating images for fun, as in Photoshop Tennis.
• Creating or participating in image memes like LOLCats.
• and many more…

What is “Skitch It” ?

Let’s take a look at a feature in Skitch called “Skitch It!” so you can learn how to easily and quickly edit images with another person or among a team or group of people.

First I’m going to load an image to Skitch.com or select from images that are already loaded to Skitch.com and have a privacy setting of “public.” For my example I found a public photo that has a Creative Commons license that lets me use the image for my own purposes, as long as I give attribution back to the source. Always respect the image copyright of images you don’t own.  I’ll start with this image already loaded in my Skitch.com account:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I plan to use this photo to create a simple LOLCat image. The first  thing I want to do is get rid of the background because it doesn’t lend itself to the final image that I have planned.

STEP 1 - Hover your mouse over the top right corner of the image and click the “Skitch it!” button.  This will cause the photo to be downloaded into your Skitch desktop application for editing. You must have the Skitch application installed before you can do this.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Once the image loaded into the Skitch desktop application I outlined the cat and used the bucket tool to paint the background black with one click. I’m skipping quickly through this process because the important part is the next step.

Here’s what the kitty looks like now:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

STEP 2 - Once I have the image changed to my liking I can “Skitch it back” to the same page that I Skitched it from in the first place. This can get confusing, so pay attention. Recap: I pulled the image from Skitch.com into Skitch.app (the desktop application), now I want to push it back online as an image comment to the original image. To do so, click the “Skitch it back” button as shown below:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

At this point I might decide to get a friend involved in editing this image. Remember, there are now TWO images on the same page. One is the image I started with, the second is the new image where the kitty is on a black background. The second image has been added as a comment to the first image.

With a black background, my friend can now visit the page, use the “Skitch it!” button to pull the second image (from the new comment) into Skitch.app (the desktop app) and edit the image further. She might decide that the cat looks like it’s jumping in the air to catch a bird, so with her basic artist skills she draws a bird into the image after first making the canvas a little bit taller than the original image. This is what her image looks like:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

When she is done editing she can then use the “Skitch it back” button to post the new image iteration back into the same image thread as the others, on Skitch.com. There will now be 3 images in the image thread.

STEP 3 - I decide that that cat needs to have a thought bubble, telling the viewer what the cat expects to do with the bird if caught. I again use the “Skitch it!” button to grab the third image in the thread and edit away. Here is my final image … Dinnerz..

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Conclusion

If you wondered what the images look like in comment form, the final and complete image thread that I created for this demo can be seen here: Kitty Wants Dinnerz

This was a quick run through of how to use the “Skitch it!” and “Skitch it back” buttons in Skitch.  The point was to illustrate how images can be easily and quickly transferred between multiple people. Communication can occur with images, rather than just words, without the need to open mega programs like Photoshop or Illustrator, all while creating a central repository of draft changes and enabling further sharing.

We feel the Skitch it! functionality has a lot of potential. Maybe you should try it and tell use what you think?