It’s tough to find apps that really increase your productivity on a daily basis. This is why I wanted to specifically talk about Skitch. Skitch is the newest app from the guys over at plasq. As of right now, Skitch is still in a rather small (and exclusive) beta. If you’re interested in getting a hold of it as soon as possible, keep an eye on their website, since they’ll be opening up the beta soon.

A couple of months ago, Keith at plasq sent me a very early beta of Skitch after we did our interview for TheAppleBlog. I played around with this early build and eagerly awaited newer revisions. I got my hands on those revisions about a week ago, and boy was I impressed. These guys really tuned up the interface. Originally, Skitch sported a dull gray interface. This was no fault on the design team. It’s common for app development to put the real interface on the app at the end-of-development. What these guys came up with is fun, simple, attractive, and fits the mood of the app perfectly.

This new design gave the app a very elastic/plastic feel to the interface that seems right in sync with what the app is for: quick, simple image manipulation. The icons are nicely designed and fit well with the goal of the app as well. The app uses a custom context based help system. Whenever you hover over a tool, a gray-gradient window pops up giving useful modifier options and explaining what the tool does.

This is a useful feature for getting accustomed to the app, but at some times can be a tad bit annoying because it repeatedly flashes up distracting my eyes. The interface for these context help windows looks nice, but at times can be difficult to read when there are windows below them. Maybe in the final release, we will see an updat to this help system.

So what can Skitch help you do? Skitch tries to simplify the process of modifying mac screenshots, spicing up photos or making custom creations. For instance, say I want to post something to flickr, perhaps a screenshot of my new desktop, but I don’t just want to show my desktop, I want to alert people to a certain part of the desktop. Skitch can do this in a matter of seconds.

First, I will use Skitch’s built in screenshot taking. It’s a bit hard to take a screenshot of taking a screenshot, so I can’t really show you; Skitch, however, handles this process fine and even provides nice grid lines to show you where the edges of the photo are (Grab does not do this). Here is the photo I’ve taken:

I now can easily draw a translucent gray circle around the object of focus (in this case: the folder “Guitar Hero Photos”).

Now, I simply fill everything outside the circle with the translucent gray.

We are done with making the photo in Skitch, so I just drag it out using the “drag me” button. When you do this, the Skitch window shrinks and let’s you place the file on your desktop or drag it to any applications you might need (Mail, 1001, Adium, iPhoto, etc).

This was a feature I talked to Keith about and told him would make Skitch a necessity for me. It looks like they’ve implemented it very well. And, honestly, it’s pretty fun doing that, so it’s no chore. It’s very very useful.

Skitch has a bunch of features, but I just want to highlight a few more.

1) You can easily take pictures of your desktop right within Skitch, but you can also take pictures of you and your surroundings right from your iSight or connected camera. I thought this was a very neat idea to incorporate into the app.

Go ahead, have fun with it!

2) Skitch has a fully working history/archive system.

This history/archive section keeps a full revision system of any image you create. Just click the archive button at any point, and a version is stored right within Skitch. You can then in the future browse through all your archives by date and even search them!

3) The other thing that is worth mentioning at least because I’m a programmer is the very impressive code behind this. All the rectangles, lines, arrows, circles, etc that you draw in Skitch are vectors. This is very useful for resizing, but basically a given in modern applications. What I really thought was cool, was that you can use the eraser tool on the entire image, and when you erase over a vector, say a circle, Skitch transforms the remaining pieces (after erasing) into a new vector. This might not seem like a big deal to the average user, but for coders, this is some serious math. Here we have one image:

I now erase a good chunk from the vectors. Then, instantly, Skitch recomputes the design and creates a new set of vectors. Spiffy!

This should wet your appetite for now. I, for one, cannot wait for the plasq team to push Skitch to a final release. Hopefully, there won’t be too much code left for them to tweak. When Skitch comes out for the public, I can see plenty of bloggers and flickr users and email junkies and AIM chatters using it every day to crop,resize and modify their pictures.