We caught up with Keith Lang from Skitch and fired him off some questions about his popular screen capture and image editing software for Mac.
What was your inspiration for creating Skitch. What motivated you?
Like many inventions, Skitch was a product built to solve our own needs. The first prototype was very simple, yet we used it every day — it was just a red rectangle frame with a pencil tool and the ability to screen grab. Before Skitch, we had worked online with staff all over the world and found getting clear ideas and feedback to other people very time consuming. When we started working on Skitch in 2006, there was no other way to quickly screengrab, annotate and share. We added more features, invested a lot of time making the workflow fast and released it. People loved it.
What makes your product better than that of your rivals?
Speed. Skitch has always been about speed — getting your idea or feedback to someone else, fast. We believe the speed and ease of Skitch allows for a better user experience.
Innovations such as our ‘dragme tab’ alleviates the user from dealing with Save windows–simply drag the file where you need it. Or our beautiful vector drawing engine that works as just like a simple pixel-based program.
Skitch.com is integrated with the Skitch application. This is where you can share images online, then get your friend’s and client’s opinions all in one place, fast.
How is business in general?
We’re very happy with the thousands of people downloading Skitch every week!
What has been the biggest success so far?
Everyday we get feedback from fans saying they love Skitch and how much easier it makes their life as a Designer/ Support person/ Teacher / Architect / Economics Professor/ You-name-it!
And the biggest obstacle?
One of the trickiest things lately is finding great Windows developers to help us finish up the Windows version. If you are one, please contact us!
What is coming down the line feature wise?
In the short term, we are still (and forever) improving the speed to make sharing images on skitch.com faster. In the long term, we can’t say, but are very excited.
Where do you see Skitch in the next 2 years?
We’d love to see millions of people using Skitch across many platforms so that’s where we’re heading. I also want to say a big thanks to the thousands of people who are already using Skitch!
Big thanks to Keith for taking the time to talk to us. And if you haven’t checked out Skitch, you’re missing out. I use it about 20 times a day to take screenshots and share them with friends. An amazing piece of software.
You can follow Skitch on Twitter, become a Skitch fan on Facebook, and check out this super image sharing software at www.skitch.com.
