Skitch

When someone like Thomas Vander Wal looks for something that will help him solve his problems, he rarely rests after finding one solution. Thomas is the type of person who keeps digging for a perfect solution to his needs. So when he writes some kind words about Skitch, we sit up, take notice and feel compelled to share his thoughts with you. If you don’t know Thomas, he’s credited with coining the terms ‘folksonomy’ and ‘infocloud’ and has been deeply involved with information architecture, social interactions, and interaction design, including his involvement with the Web Standards Project steering committee.

The ease of use, beauty in the interaction would make it really difficult for another tool to supplant the viewable screen grabs and sub-page screen grabs of Skitch. The freakishly ease of moving grabs and images out of Skitch into the apps and places I need to use the images and places I want and need to share them is unparalleled in any other application on any platform.

As mentioned above, Thomas is not one to rest until he finds exactly what he needs, so while Skitch performs flawlessly for part of his specific need, he also mentions:

I hope that one day Skitch offers a full-page screen grab of web pages, but that day is not today.

We’ll do our best to look into it Thomas! We love hearing feedback, so if *you* would like to share an idea or request with us, then you can let us know via the feedback tab on the back of Skitch.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

OK, admit it, you know you have a shoe fetish. Why not turn that into a something truly heart warming by using all those images you take of your feet into a new online avatar for every day of the week? Want inspiration? OK, check this out, images created with Skitch of course…

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Everyone plays with their web cam from time to time. Admit it, you make funny faces and take a snap from time to time. Sometimes you alter these images with applications like Photo Booth, Pixelmator or even break out the big guns and use Photoshop to generate some fun stuff that you then post online and share with friends.

Here at team plasq we do this too. Except we use Skitch or Doozla to generate really cool artwork and share it in under a minute.

There are many ways to do it, here’s two.

STEP 1
Open Skitch, click ‘Cam’, make a face, click ‘Snap.’

STEP 2
Select the ‘Pen’ tool, outline your face.
Select the ‘Circle’ tool, outline your eyes and mouth.
Select the ‘Paint bucket’ tool, select a color and fill in some areas of the image.

STEP 3
Webpost your images to Skitch.com and share your images with friends.
Be sure to experiment, pixels are cheap, but most of all have fun!

Here’s a quick drawing I did on the fly with Skitch, to show how easy it can be to make some awesome, t-shirt ready designs.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Oh, yeah, remember I said we use Skitch AND Doozla? Well, Doozla is our newly released drawing software for kids. It uses the same vector drawing engine that we built for Skitch, so the same drawing fun can be had by kids and parents alike. Don’t believe me? Check out these nifty Doozla doodles made by Andy Lane and his wife while they were testing Doozla for the first time. This husband/wife team run RootArtCenter.com in Mount Vernon, OH.

Have you ever squinted at a photo because you can’t really make out the details of the image? Or maybe you just want to see more detail from a small part of the image in question… Well, in many cases Skitch can help you with that.

Let’s say that you have a photo of the ocean surf, and you want to see a close up of one section of the breakers…

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

STEP 1
Click, then drag and drop the image into the Skitch application. You can do this with an image on your local hard drive, or pull photos off of a website.

(be respectful of all copyrights  - please don’t steal images for your own use)

STEP 2
Grab any corner of the Skitch application window and resize the image so the detail(what  you want to see more of) is large enough for your needs.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

STEP 3
Grab any of the edges of the image and crop the image down to size, leaving only that part of the image which you are interested in.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

After you complete your resizing and cropping you should end up with a final image showing exactly what you wanted to see more details of.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Total time elapsed to create the final image? About 10 seconds.

Skitch is amazingly fast at virtually any image edit you want to make.

Your results may vary, based on the quality of the original image you begin with and the amount of zoom you apply . To be fair, the image above was created as a PNG from a master photo that was shot in RAW format. This enabled me to zoom as much as possible, up to a point where you can begin to see the ‘grain’ of the photo. I used this image in order to show you an extreme example of zooming, but this technique will work with virtually any image type.

Do you have a nifty Skitch tip to share? Please leave a comment!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!