[START OF AUDIO] Steve Dotto here.
Today, we’re going to look at Skitch.
What is Skitch?
It’s a screen capture tool that has annotation capabilities and is surprisingly useful.
How it works is we capture images from our screen, mainly from our computer screen but
you can also use it on your mobility device like your iPad or your Android phone.
Nothing for the iPhone yet which we’ll talk about in a few moments.
But you capture the image and then you can mark it up using their mark up tools and use
that to communicate your thoughts, ideas, questions, what have you.
Think about it.
I’ll just show you how it works.
Let’s say you and I are going to the theater tonight and you don’t know exactly where
to park because you’ve never been to this theater before.
Well, I would call up Google Maps in that case.
I would then open Skitch up and if we take a look here at the console of Skitch, we see
we’ve got a whole series of tools down the left-hand side which allows us to annotate
whatever it is that we have captured.
Down the right-hand side are our capture tools.
I can just click on ‘Snap’ that gives me cross hairs that allow me to determine
the screen area that I want to capture.
Anything on our computer screen at all can be captured.
In this case here, a bit of a map.
I take the picture and now it’s ready for me to annotate.
Let me draw an arrow to exactly where we should consider parking.
There’s parking right here.
I can go into my text tool, say, “Park here,’ and then I can choose from the dropdown menu
to email this to you and I’ve communicated really effectively exactly where we should
park.
It’s really quite easy.
I love this tool.
Of course we can mark up far more than just maps.
We can use it for all sorts of different things.
Let’s take a look at some of the tools that are here in Skitch to see if we can get kind
of a better idea of how it works and what its potential is.
They’ve really thought it out.
Well, it comes from the folks at Evernote so we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s
got some nice, creative tools.
Actually, Evernote acquired it.
Other people did the heavy lifting at the beginning but Evernote knew a good thing when
they saw it.
If we take a look at the menu, we can see that we’ve got all sorts of typical preferences
but then as we go down to the bottom, we have a whole series of different ideas on ways
that we can capture screens.
I won’t point to all of them in detail now but suffice it say it does more than just
the cross hairs snapshot that I just showed you.
You can capture whole screens.
You can have delayed captures.
You can capture it from your camera.
Lots of different ways of capturing images and then you can rotate the images or modify
them once you’ve got them.
Of course, as I showed you, you also have the ability to mark them up, selecting different
colors as you fill in different areas.
Some people use it just for drawing up and dressing up pictures as well, I imagine.
Not as sophisticated tools as you’re going to find in Photoshop but come on.
It’s all about quick and easy communication.
Now here’s where it starts to impress me when I look at some of the little tools.
For example, one of the things that you’re always going to want is you want to grab,
make an attachment of something that you can email or you can store.
It can be easier to save and then you see where it says, ‘Drag me’ right here.
I’m going to click on that, I’m going to drag it down, and look at that.
It becomes a JPEG, right on my desktop, ready for me to send somewhere.
Then Skitch minimizes itself and opens back up as soon as I tap on it.
The other thing that I really like and this is really useful for doing web graphics is
down here, they have this ‘Resize’ button.
If I click here, it gives the physical dimensions of the image that I’ve just created.
But look here, I can apply preset sizing things which is especially useful when we’re doing
web development of when we’re doing any work on the web.
So for banner ads or leader boards, it comes up with the standard sizes.
Now this map that I just took really isn’t appropriate for most of these but you can
see that it automatically formats the Skitch document into those sizes.
So if you’re creating little pieces for you website here or there, this tool quickly
becomes very indispensable just because of this resizing feature that’s built into
it.
Of course, Skitch also works on mobility devices, in my case, on my iPad.
Curiously, it’s not available for the iPhone yet which I find a little not surprising.
I would think that because it’s iOS, they should be able to get it working on both of
them fairly quickly.
Now where it comes really useful is taking pictures with the camera of your mobility
device and then quickly emailing them to people for communication purposes.
It does work on your Android devices.
But for example, maybe you have a wall that’s damaged and you want to get a quote from somebody
to repair that.
You take a picture, draw a few directions on it, say, “this is the problem here.
I want you to fix this.
Get a new baseboard for me,” that sort of stuff and that will give you the ability to
email that and do it all from your mobility device.
Of course, it’s also really good for drawing moustaches on friends.
That’s one of my favorite uses of it.
Skitch is free.
It’s available online.
I think it’s a terrific productivity tool.
If this video has been useful, drop by our website.
We’ve got lots more at DottoTech.com.
I’m Steve Dotto.
Thanks for spending this time with me today.
[END OF AUDIO]
Steve Dotto0Skitch0September 5, 2012