Skitch... my favorite desktop application of 2007? 23
It just occurred to me that my first Skitch was on July 7th, 2007. 7/7/7. I’ve been meaning to post an article about how Skitch has changed the way our team approaches reporting bugs and communicating ideas visually.
First of all, the Skitch web site advertises it (see video) as a fun tool for playing with photos and sharing stuff with friends/family. While this is true, I think their bigger market could be those of us who work in the web design and development community. It took a less than a week for Skitch to become a tool that I rely on the most during my day to day work and since it keeps surprising me that people aren’t using it and/or haven’t heard about it… I thought that I’d share how we’re using it at Planet Argon.
Introducing “LOLBUGZ”
Our team is currently using Lighthouse for managing bugs/tickets for internal and client projects. If there is one way to slow down bug fixing cycle.. .it’s the ticket submission process. It takes a lot of time and commitment to try and communicate some problems that you’ll find in a web application. This is why screenshots can be so useful to helping speed up the process. Skitch allows us to not only provide a screenshot really quickly, but it gives us the ability to focus our attention with shapes and text, which provides more context when viewing an image.
For example, here are a few real-world Skitches that I’ve used to report some problems.
What happened to this drop down?
This pagination needs some CSS-Love!
Oh no! Tags are getting grouped together…
Styling has gone crazy…
I mastered an unordered list! (hooray!!)
This list isn’t scaling anymore…
Side note: LOL BUGZ was a term coined by Rick Olson at Active Reload to describe the tickets that I post for Lighthouse. ;-)
Trying out 15 during the initial releases for the iPhone… bug report sent via twitter to Erik Kastner.
As you can see, using Skitch helps communicate some very specific things without needing to type a huge description. Of course, we do try our best to add more context with our tickets. For example, here is a real-world example of a ticket that I posted on Lighthouse. As you’ll see, there are a few skitches embedded in the tickets, which works much better than attaching screenshots to tickets.
One of the best features of Skitch is it’s work-flow. Within a few seconds, I can do the following tasks.
- Take a screenshot of a specific region of my screen
- Add some arrows and text
- Click on Webpost, which will upload directly to myskitch.com
- Click on Share to navigate to the new upload
- Click on the embed textfield and it uses JS to copy the embed html into my paste buffer
- Paste the html snippet directly into the ticket that I’m reporting
- Submit my LOL BUG
Side note: it also allows you to upload to Flickr, a ftp account, etc.
Over the past four months, Skitch has become one of my favorite OS X tools. The interface is lightweight and the workflow is almost perfect (feature request: providing the embed code in my paste buffer without needing to go to myskitch would be A+++)
I’ve also used Jing, which works on Windows and OS X and does video. I’ve not found it to be as intuitive for working in this manner. In fact, the work-flow leaves a lot to be desired. However! It does do video and this has come in handy a few times for showing people some “live” interaction-type bugs that can’t be communicated as easily through text/images.
If you’re not using Skitch yet and are on OS X… I highly recommend that you try it out for a few weeks during a bug fixing sprint. We’ve gotten our clients and almost everybody on the team using it in this fashion. The productivity increases haven’t gone unnoticed.
That’s not to say that it’s not fun for point out things that aren’t related to your project bugs. ;-)
Happy Skitching!
UPDATE
Plasq liked the writeup and gave me 50 extra invites to pass out for Skitch. So, if you’re in need of one… ask me via email. Thanks Plasq team!
Enjoying the content? Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed.
I am intrigued but seems Skitch is under private Beta. Do you have any invites you can give out for us that want to try it out after reading your post? Thanks man.
Eric (and everyone else),
I have 5 Skitch invites that have been collecting dust if anybody wants them.
email me at: chris [dot] griffin [at] planetargon [dot] com
Side note… Plasq loves me and gave me 50 extra invites. So email me if you need one at robby [at] planetargon [dot] com. Not sure why I bother with breaking it up… spammers are smarter than me anyways.
Hey chris, I hit you up asking for an invite by email :)
Those who’ve seen me work know that I don’t generally find GUI apps, except Firefox, Adium, and Preview, appealing. I can almost always do things quicker in urxvt and a console app (e.g. Mutt for Mail).
But you have me convinced with your report of Skitch. Perhaps the 4th GUI app to add to my list. I’ll have to check it out.
Thanks for reporting a new work-flow to an old problem. :)
I love skitch’s workflow, but seriously, the chrome feels like some little kid reader rabbit Xtreme app
I love skitch’s workflow, but seriously, the chrome feels like some little kid reader rabbit Xtreme app.
So dear skitch peoples: tone the chrome down a bit (yeah swooshy into the menu bar, and flippy control panel crap, i’m looking at you) and get it the hell out of beta so I can give you money already. I have my own ftp sites so I don’t need the ‘myskitch’ stuff.
I’ve been a Skitch user for a while but I recently discovered Jing and really love it!
Jing does the same as skitch but lets you also create quick screencasts and publish them in seconds.
Check it out it’s available for PC and Mac and in public beta. I personally ask my clients to install the app and send me the reports.
lol, just realized that I only quickly read your post and you already mentioned Jing :) sorry about that.
Wow, this looks awesome for posting bugs. I tried to do this with screenshots and photoshop but it was too labor intensive. This definitely could help speed things up.
Thanks for the post!
I just asked for an invite from Robby and can’t wait to get my hands on this. Happy Thanksgiving Robby.
Okay, I just sent a few more invites out and updated my blog post to mention that I have a bunch. So hit me up for one. :-)
Thanks for the invite!
Thanks for the invite. Skitch looks nice. Also, based on Matt’s comment I took a look at Jing. In my 10 minutes of playing with both I definitely prefer Jing. They’re both solid and very smooth products though. I will keep an eye on both.
I couldn’t agree with you more! Skitch is my favorite app of 2007! Relaying information to dev teams i work with has never been easier!.... i sound like a damn commercial
Fascinating idea. These look way better than my time consuming photoshop screenshots. Thanks for the tip!
Those are the most entertaining bug reports I’ve ever seen.
Just downloaded skitch. I (heart) your examples and have since requested all bug reports for www.howcast.com be sent in LOL BUGZ speak. :) It makes the bad news much easier to take
Hi, Robby,
Really enjoyed the post, and thanks again for the Skitch invite. :-) I was inspired to use Skitch slideshows instead of screencasts for user documentation.
For those of us developing on a windows platform, SnagIt by TechSmith, with their ‘Output to Flickr’ addon/plugin, available here: http://www.techsmith.com/snagit/accessorycategory.asp?catID=1 will accomplish the same thing as Skitch.
Once they’re on Flickr, you can embed them from there—and build slideshows, as Ana Nelson describes in her recent blog post, mentioned in her comment here.
Good thing too—this post was beginning to increase my level of Mac envy ‘till I realized. I have to keep the envy level under control, as a Macbook is not in my immediate future, and I can’t go around being miserable all the time.
icanhasbetainvitetoo?
Hello Robby,
Do you have any invites left for SnagIt? I read your other post about Tumblr also and am impressed with what you can do with SnagIt. I’d love to try it out.
Thanks,
Jim
Hello Robby,
Do you have any invites left for Skitch? (correction – brain freeze)
I read your other post about Tumblr also and am impressed with what you can do with SnagIt. I’d love to try it out.
Thanks,
Jim