Where has my head been (probably off on a bender with my manners)! I do apologize, but spending too much time in a “secure and undisclosed” location can do that to a guy. While it may seem on first blush that this is just another heart post, this particular heart is so much more than just some anatomically incorrect window dressing. This particular heart is the icon of an application that’s so simple and yet so useful (aren’t all the great ones that way?)

This app started life as a nice way for the plasq’ers to take quick screen captures, annotate them and zip them back and forth (you see, plasq is a global crew, each working from home and spread all over the world). Anyone who’s tried to express some graphic idea using letters on a screen knows that an image is much more effective than any description, no matter how verbose. The ability to obtain this image idea, capture it and provide it to a team using only one program saves time, keeps ideas fresh, and helps to make the creative process more organic as these unfiltered ideas fly! Working this way could very well lead to something great... and it did. Maybe you’ve heard of an app called Comic Life? Surely an app that can lend it’s powers to the production of such a fantastic app must be great mixed with a glass of greatjuice (and greatchips on the side)! What is this app? I’m glad you asked!

SKITCH is, in the words of plasq is “the BEST way to make LOLCATS” Now if that doesn’t sum it up nicely in one obscure phrase I don’t know what does! For the rest of you internoobs, lets look at it’s basics. Right off the bat, you can click the handy SNAP button and grab a shot from your screen. You can also do an iSight cam SNAP as well, so that’s two ways to get an image to play with right there. Another way is that it connects to your iPhoto library and can bring over any of your images, quickly and easily. That, in a nutshell, is the image input part. Now, what can you do with those images? My, you’re FULL of good questions today. Chock full.

The what that you can do to those images is draw on ‘em. You get all the standard tools of the drawing trade;

the pencil, straight lines, circles and squares and a way to erase them. Combine that with 5 thickness options and you’d say that was great, right? But that’s not all! You also get a paint bucket to fill acres and acres of pixels all at once. And there’s still more! There’s a handy text tool with 5 sizes of text and an arrow tool to point at, well pretty much anything! You can point at objects on a screenshot, the wicked haircut of a buddy, or even other arrows! Truly, that MUST be all, right? Ah, yeah. Yeah it is. So, you’ve got an image, you’ve placed all kinds of useful annotations and scribbles on it, what’s next? (oh sorry) So NOW you want to know want to do with those images? Gee whillikers! Three in a row, that’s got to me some kind of monumental feat of querying skill!

Now, we come to the output part which is not only handy, but dandy as Mandy’s candy. There’s a drag me

tab at the bottom that you can use to pick a file format and then dr-a-a-a-g your altered image into any other app, just like that! There’s also a webpost button

you can use to post to myskitch.com, your .Mac site, flickr, or anywhere else you’ve got that uses FTP, SFTP or WEBDAV standards. In other words, if you can’t get your image there with Skitch, your image probably doesn’t need to be there! If you don’t want your image to go anywhere, but still keep it around for later, you can always click the Save button

which will send your creation to the History, where it waits patiently for it’s day in the sun!

That’s a short and sweet description, but there’s a good video at their site that will give even more details, including the bit about why vectors are the cats meow. The only way to get more of an idea of what it does is to actually use it for yourself! That brings some Good news and some Bad news. The Bad news is that it’s currently in PRIVATE Beta, which just means that while a lot of people are testing and playing with this wonderful app, you’ve got to have an invite from someone else that’s ALREADY in... like me... in order to get the free beta. Therein lies the part of Good. There’s two ways you can get my attention and get one of the invites I have left. You can either send an email to me here OR post your request in plasq’s forums. Either way, myself or someone else with invites will be more than happy to shoot you an invite so you to can create the kind of Skitches you’ve always wanted to!

Because you KNOW you’ve wanted to... you’ve had a fiending for a good Skitch for some time. Admitting that to yourself is the FIRST step to recovery, you know.