Skitch Archive

Tonight at the NY Tech Meetup, seven companies will present their startup ideas. I am looking forward (as I do every month) to getting ya’all coverage of the meetup. One company who has shared some info on their startup is called Aviary. Aviary is a NY-based startup which has created a suite of online graphics tools that appear to rival Photoshop for the basics.

Aviary describes itself as, "a website for artists of all genres to create, edit and share their works directly in their favorite browser." There are about 15 total image tools, all with bird names like Owl and Phoenix. The tools are all available online inside the browser along with downloadable versions using Adobe Air, similar to Pownce.

What makes Aviary even more innovative is the way they protect and have thought about how artists work. Aviary tracks all rights, royalties and attributions in a work forever, and across collaborations. Aviary’s applications communicate with each other, allowing for seamless editing in multiple tools for a single project, as well as shared resources between tools.

Pricing hasn’t been revealed yet but during the beta all access is free. The one thing that worries me with Aviary is their domain name – it’s not aviary.com but rather a.viary.com — if popularity grows, will people be able to find the app? 

Aviary has given us 100 beta invites to give away to our great readers. If you’d like one, go here. We will have the demo video from their presentation tonight.

Here is an example of what Aviary can do using our favorite poptart, Britney Spears. Damn.

Updates: The official Skitch site is located at: www.plasq.com/skitch.
We have 50 invites! Invites gone, grab the feed to be notified when we snag some more for ya’all!

I received a tip last week that Skitch, by Plasq, was moving into invite-beta mode this week. Colin just posted additional information about this move. I am in the process of attempting to get beta keys for all of you, but for now, hop over to Colin's blog for a key.

So I remember being a young kid, going to a computer fair and buying the first version of PSP – Paint Shop Pro. It came on one 3.5" floppy and made me so excited to draw and color. Skitch reminds me of PSP in it's ease of use and absolute functionality.

Skitch is not here to replace Photoshop. Skitch is like MS Paint on drugs. Colin has an in-depth overview which includes, "Skitch is jammed packed with features yet the interface for those features never gets in your way or becomes overbearing. Quickly take a screenshot in just about anyway you can think of. Then you can annotate a screenshot once you’ve captured it. Sharing your screenshot with the world is probably Skitch’s strong suit."

So basically Skitch is a way to take screenshots, mark them up, and share them with the world. Loads of "uploaded by Skitch" notes are appearing on Flickr. The app is available on the mac only and my hope is that they release a web-version of this. This would make a great iPhone app.

Lastly, they are also launching MySkitch, a social network around sharing the screenshots.