Skitch - Snap, Draw, Share

Like many of us, one of the things I missed most when switching to a Mac was that there was no app that replaced Paint. While there are more powerful apps, such as Photoshop, there isn’t a simple app for users who want to quickly edit their images. Finally, though, there is something that serves this purpose: Skitch.

Yes, Skitch is a simple app, but still incredibly functional and easy to use. There are many ways to get started. You can take a screenshot of your desktop, take a picture with an iSight, look through photos in iPhoto, Aperture, and your pictures folder. You can also drag a photo from anywhere on your computer (and even the Internet) to start editing.

Once you have found the image you want to edit, you can do things like add text (it supports any font you have on your computer), draw with the paintbrush (it stays smooth if you make the image larger or smaller, and even supports the pressure sensitivity included with most tablets), make shapes such as lines, boxes, circles, and arrows, and then erase what you have done. Skitch also allows you to clear all the things you have done (by clicking Wipe under Undo) leaving just the original image, or undoing as many steps as you like. You can also move around something that you have drawn without editing the image at all.

When you are done editing the image, you can “webpost” it (to mySkitch, Flickr, .Mac, and your FTP server), email it, send it to Bluetooth, and drag it onto your desktop. While I wish it supported uploading to ImageShack, I just use the Image Upload Widget instead.

The image editing is not the only easy to use part of the app, either. Editing preferences in Skitch is easy too, by clicking the preferences button at the top of the window, or by hitting Command-, (like in most apps). From the General preferences tab, you can easily change the color of the window, change the preferences from screenshots, and much more. Like the rest of the app, the learning curve in the preferences is very gradual.

Since it is still in beta, Skitch does have some things that need to be worked out. Some of my complaints include the non-standard UI, the lack of ImageShack uploading, and the ability to delete images from mySkitch online. Other than that, it is by far the most useful app I have seen for quickly editing your images. Skitch is in public beta, to see how mySkitch holds up and to get feedback, but will be a commercial app when it is released. For a more complete instruction manual for Skitch, watch the video below.

You can sign up to get on the list to receive an invite for the public beta at plasq.com, or maybe we’ll have some invites to give away tomorrow (hint hint)…