Steve Dotto here and how the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
Iím feeling particularly orange today.
Today, I want to show you a tool which has slowly become a go-to tool in my arsenal.
I used to use it a little bit, then I used it a lot more and now I use it pretty much
every day.
The tool is Skitch.
It used to be just for Mac users but now itís for everybody.
Youíre going to want to stick around as we look at Skitch today on DottoTech.
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Now speaking of great content, I hope todayís video is comprised of great content.
Iím going to show you a tool called Skitch, which is basically screen capture software.
It comes to us from the good folks at Evernote.
Now when I first looked at Skitch, I think it was just available for the Mac so it had
a fairly limite d audience and then it came out on iOS, so it started to reach more people.
But now as I look at Skitch on the Evernote site, I see that itís available on both our
mobile device platforms or the two major ones, Android and iPhone and iOS, and itís also
available not just on the Mac but on Windows and Windows 8.
So it looks like everybody can enjoy Skitch.
Now what makes Skitch special because there are lots of screen capture utilities and there
are lots of markup utilities?
What makes it special is its integration with Evernote.
Iím not going to dwell too much on that because I just want to kind of show you just how it
fits but the Evernote integration, every time we create a screen capture or create a graphical
element that we could use Skitch for, it saves it to an Evernote notebook for us which makes
it very convenient for saving, archiving it, and distributing it later if we want to.
Now hereís why Skitch has slowly become more integral in my life.
I create a lot of simple graphics for things like the videos slates for the videos that
youíre watching now.
But increasingly, I create even more graphics for my social media posts.
Itís more interesting having a Facebook post that has a graphic included than just a text
post so weíre always looking for graphical elements to add.
Skitch, I find, facilitates the adding of graphics an awful lot.
Case in point, just a couple of days ago I was having trouble with my computer.
It was slowing down.
Memory was not available to me for some reason.
Iíve just upgraded my OS and Iíve just upgraded Safari, which is one of the web browsers that
I use, and I use a utility called Memory Scope, which tells me what resources are using what
amount of memory.
Take a look here.
Iíve got to show you.
I made a Facebook post because I discovered that Safari, Appleís web browser, was using
an enormous amount of memory.
They were using like 25% of my system resource and Iíve got a 12 GB Mac here.
Itís not the most powerful workhorse in the world but itís got a reasonable amount of
memory.
It was using 25% of the memory that I had available.
What the heck, Safari?
So I wanted to share my pain with the rest of the world as I decided I was going to switch
over and start using Firefox a little bit more as my B Browser.
Just so you know, I use Chrome mainly.
Donít worry.
Chrome is my main browser but I like to have two browsers going for a variety of reasons
and Safari was always my secondary browser.
Now Iím going to be using Firefox because of this issue.
So I wanted to create a Facebook post complaining about it and letting other people know that
there might be an issue with Safari.
So what I did was I went into Memory Scope just like this and I opened Skitch.
I have Skitch open pretty much all the time on my computer.
It allows us to create Crosshair Snapshots, Timed Crosshairs, which allows you to capture
things like menus and that sort of stuff, or Full Screen but Crosshair is the main thing
that we do.
I could create, just like this, boom, like that.
Just by marquee-ing the area that I want, it tells you the size of it and allows you
to capture it.
It can also set a timed capture here but I just click Capture and now itís created a
quick screen grab.
Now the cool thing about Skitch at this point here is I can do all sorts of drawing of arrows
and adding of text.
It does a great job of basically allowing us to mark up documents.
Now this is very different than the kind of memes, the photo treatments, or the text treatments
that Iíve shown you in another app like at ìCanvoî (0:05:00.0) where youíre trying
to create the internet memes.
This is for illustration, to point at something and say this is what I want changed, this
is whatís important, this is the number you should be looking at in a screencap or in
a graphic capture.
Once youíve done that, you have a couple of options.
The first thing is if we just save it, itís going to be saved into our Evernote notebook
which is awesome.
But if we want to use it very quickly in something like Facebook, we probably donít want to
put it in Evernote first.
Instead we just want to create a JPEG or a graphic of it so you can either export itólet
me just find the exportóyou can export it into any of the standard formats but to be
honest, I just basically look up PNG or JPEG.
We can save it out if we want as a graphic or even easier with something like this, you
just grab it here, drag it up to your desktop, let it go, and it creates a JPEG of it right
away that we can use.
Then weíre able to take that JPEG and put it into a post such as I did here in this
Facebook post, which actually createdóif I take a look here; letís just take a lookóit
actually created quite a bit of traffic, one post, four hours ago I posted it.
Now I donít have a lot of followers on Facebook, 3,000 in the DottoTech channel but itís gotten
other 700 people viewing it.
Itís got about eight comments, a couple of shares, quite a few Likes, and itís basically
sparked and started some conversation in my community about an issue of Apple being basically
either lazy or hyper-aggressive against Flash still is probably the ultimate reason by making
the Safari browser be such a memory hog, which I think is awful.
Okay, so thatís Sktich running on our desktop computer and I find that I use it on a pretty
much daily basis.
But itís not just for our desktop computers, oh no.
It is also a great tool for our phones.
Let me just call up my iPhone here.
Do I have the screen behind?
I think itís even running behind.
There it is right there.
I might have to refresh it here.
Letís get it back up.
There we go.
So thereís the iPhone on the screen.
So let me just show you quickly before we are done today Skitch running on the iPhone.
Have I got it open?
I donít know if I have it open.
No, I doní so Iím going to open up Skitch here.
There it is.
So Skitch on the iPhone allows us to take a photo or to use anything that we have.
Iím just going to turn my camera on and Iím going to take a lovely picture of me because
I have the right to use me.
There it is, my face, and you can mark it up.
If I tap on the Tools, it shows you all of the different markup tools that I have.
Oh look at that.
I can add a smiling face to it right here.
How does that work?
Iíve never done that.
Oh there it is.
I could add a smiling face to my glasses.
There it is right there.
But you can basically add little arrows and little stuff like that.
Of course, thatís pretty useless what Iím trying to do there but you can add text.
You can mark up the graphic in any way you like then you can save it.
We have all sorts of different sharing and saving options.
You can email it, you can send it to Facebook, to Twitter, or you can send it to other apps
and of course you can integrate it directly into Evernote at this point here as well.
So Skitch shows tremendous flexibility, running on both iOS and Android, Windows and Mac.
It is the one screen capture utility that you need and itís free, 100% free.
It integrates brilliantly with Facebook.
What more can you ask in a screen capture and annotation utility?
I think itís a two thumbs up-type app.
I hope you found this video today to be useful.
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I think thatís everything for today.
Iím Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!