Daily Archives: Monday, 14th April 2008
Skitch
Now this is pretty cool. I found out about this at the weekend, signed up for the beta, downloaded it and started playing, and I love it. What is it? Well, in essence, it’s a screen capture program.
Hold on, I hear you say. Surely the Mac has built-in stuff for that? Well, yes it has. And it’s pretty good, too. Nicely defaults to PNG format, and works at least as well as Gadwin Print Screen does on Windows.
But Skitch does a lot more than that. Quite apart from full-screen or rectangular area captures, it can also grab a snapshot from a webcam, or you can drop any image file onto its window. And once you’ve captured something, you can start to play with it. It has really nice annotation tools – add lines, boxes or ellipses. Add arrows. Add text. Now you could do all that in your choice of image editor, but you’d have to open the image first. And unless you’re using a proper layered editor like Photoshop, all your annotations would be fixed lumps on the picture. With Skitch, they seem to be objects that you can resize, re-colour, move and generally mess around with. This is great if you want to take a screenshot and make notes on it, and saves a lot of time. I used Skitch for the annotated image in my Forklift post.
What’s that? You want more? Well, once you’ve captured and annotated your image, you’ll most likely want to do something with it. Skitch lets you save in a good range of formats (the ubiquitous JPG, the essential PNG, the indigenous PDF, and others, including its own format for passing to other Skitch users). So far so good. That’s when it gets a bit more clever – at the bottom of the Skitch window is a handle which you can use to drag and drop the image into any other application, icon, or location that will accept having an image dropped on it. Handy. Or maybe you’d like to upload it somewhere?
To get Skitch, you have to register for an account at skitch.com, and you can upload your images there. Or you can set it up to upload to your Flickr account, or (and this is nice) to any (S)FTP account you might have. Now that would be nice, but it’s even better. Once it’s uploaded the file, it flashes a little icon at you. Right-click on that, and you can copy either the plain URL of the image, or some reasonably correct HTML ready to drop into a blog post or web page. Or you can get the kind of code used by forums and the like.
While it’s in beta, it’s free to use and play with as much as you like. So far, there is no word on what it will cost when it goes live, or whether it will be a simple price for the program, or a subscription of some kind for the service. I’ll keep playing with it while it’s free, and I’d certainly consider paying moderate amounts for it.
Related posts
Weight Report – 14 April 2008
Mutter. Yes, up again today, which is probably the after-effects of the weekend, or something. I can see I’m going to have to try to motivate myself to go out an walk more at weekends, or something.
On the positive side, I walked to and from work, and despite feeling a wee bit annoyed, stressed and in need of something nice, I resisted the temptation, and just had a sandwich[1] for lunch. I’m not sure how I managed that, as I really thought I was going to crack and go for the sausage rolls…
[1] Nice cheese and pickle one again.
Forklift
As I spend more time working with the Mac[1], I keep finding new toys to make the experience more pleasant. One thing I didn’t much like about Finder[2] was that copying files from one folder to another wasn’t quite as slick as it could be. You either have to juggle two windows, or make sure you’ve got a shortcut to the destination folder, or other such fiddly things. Then I heard about Forklift, a combined file manager and FTP/SFTP client from Binary Nights. I downloaded a free trial and started to play. And I soon realised that it was exactly what I was looking for, and more besides.
You get two panes which can display different locations on your computer, your network, or (and this is the really nice bit) remote locations on FTP, or better still, SFTP servers. Files can be copied or moved in the usual drag and drop way, or by copying and pasting. If you have a pane open on an (S)FTP server, you can just drop in a file from your Desktop or elsewhere without actually having to navigate to the location and upload it from within the client. Nice, that.
Another neat feature is the “Sync Browsing” button. If you have one side open on your local copy of a website, and the other on the server copy, click this button and then navigate through the folders on one side. The other side will automagically keep in step with you, which is great if you need to update files in several different folders.
One more really cool feature is that it adds a Quick Look feature for remote files. Yup, you get a preview of images at the bottom of the window, which is quite nice if you’ve got a lot of files with similar names and you want to be sure you’re not deleting the wrong one…
It’s not the cheapest of utilities at $29.95, especially as UK VAT was added on to that, but I found it useful enough to pay for it. I already prefer it to any other FTP client I’ve tried on the Mac, and it’s more user friendly and flexible than the one I’ve always used on Windows. Add in all the lovely file management stuff, such as adding extra tabs so you can quickly flick between different folders, and it’s a very nice package indeed.
It’s available on a 15 day trial, which should be enough for most people to decide if it’s for them. I like it, anyway…
[1] So much so that when I’m on a Windows machine, I keep trying to do Mac things, which don’t work. Oddly enough, I rarely try to do Windows things on the Mac.
[2] Pretty much the equivalent of Explorer on Windows
Related posts
A Dummy Too Far
I’ve never been keen on the whole concept of the “For Dummies” books. I think it’s that cheery “A reference for the rest of us” slogan that I find irritating. Don’t get me wrong – I think introductory books on all manner of subjects are a Good Thing, and on some subjects an introductory book is just what I need. But what I don’t need is a book that starts off by insulting my intelligence with its title, regardless of how good or bad its content may be. There are plenty of things I know little to nothing about, but that doesn’t make me a “Dummy”, it just means that if I need to know about the subject, I’ll have some learning to do.
But that’s just me, I suppose. The books are very successful, and cover an alarming range of subjects. However, there are limits. There are some things that should not be attempted by dummies, and one of those is disaster recovery planning. This involves a lot of thought, and a lot of research. It’s hard. It’s even harder to do it right[1]. So this title worried me somewhat. Seriously, if you think of yourself as a “dummy”, IT Disaster Recovery Planning is not something you should be getting involved in.
[1] “Right” being defined as “if something does break very badly, you can get it back up and running in an acceptable[2] time frame”
[2] Which is something that has to be discussed and agreed upon as part of the plan
