Back in November, Keith Lang wrote about our plans to make Skitch more powerful and more useful, while also bringing back some of the app’s most-loved features. Today, we are happy to release an update (version 2.0.3) packed with improvements that includes many of your favorite sharing and customization capabilities. Let’s take a look at what’s new in Skitch for Mac.
Custom Styles
We’ve added a number of items to the Style menu to let you customize the look of your annotations.
Skitch helps you visually communicate your thoughts with annotations, and now, you can select custom colors that make the message clearer than ever. Open the style menu and click on the large color swatch to select any color you can dream of.
Tool Sizes
We’ve added more sizes to the Style Bar so that all your annotations can be in perfect proportion to your image. If you can’t find the right size among our preset options, you can also drag the blue corner dot of the marquee around text, shapes, and arrows to make them large, small, and everything in between.
Usability Improvements
Timed Screen Snaps
In this release, we’ve added Timed Screen Snaps to the Capture dropdown menu. Once you click on it (or use the shortcut CTRL + CMD + Shift + 5), you can use the crosshairs to select the area you would like to include in the shot. As soon as you release the mouse, a countdown will begin letting you move around windows and open menus to create the layout you want before the Screen Snap is taken — it’s great for building walk-through tutorials and guides.
Bigger, Better Sharing Menu
There are a ton of ways to choose how you share your images in this latest version of Skitch. Let’s walk through a few of the added sharing features below.
More Share Options
Click the Share arrow in the upper right corner to reveal a totally new sharing menu, with icons that make it easier to choose the option you want. You’ll be able to share via email, Message, Twitter, Facebook, and iPhoto. You can also turn your Skitch image into your desktop background.
There are also more ways to post your Skitch images, including direct image URLs, HTML, HTML thumbnails, and forum code. Here’s how it works:
- Choose the type of shared URL you would like to use from the Sharing Options dropdown menu
- Click on “Share and Copy Share URL” under the Sharing menu
- The Shared Link to the type you have selected will now be added to your clipboard
Please remember that if you delete the image in either Skitch or Evernote, any public links will break.
Sharing Preferences
If you visit the app Preferences in this version, you’ll notice that the Sharing tab contains several new choices for you.
Shortened Shared URLs
You now have the option to create shorter shared URLs by checking the “Share Skitch Notes with short URLs” box in the app Preferences. It’s important to keep in mind that while short URLs are great for sharing over IM and Twitter, they use fewer characters and are therefore easier for someone to guess.
FTP/sFTP Access
Sharing to FTP/sFTP is back! Go the Preferences menu to configure this option and start sharing to any supported server you’d like.
Auto Copy
If you frequently share links to your Skitch notes, then Auto Copy is a great time-saver. To enable the tool, check the box to “Automatically Share and Copy Link after creating new Skitch Notes” in your Preferences. When you create a new note, Skitch will automatically copy the shared link to your clipboard. You can then paste it into email or social network update without having to hit copy each time. It’s an amazingly simple way to streamline your workflow.
More Improvements
In addition, we also made text render beautifully, improved how sync works and made the app more responsive when you make changes. All these changes add up to a great annotation experience. Let us know what you think. We’re excited about this next step in making Skitch an even better tool for communicating visually. There’s much more to come!
