At the Evernote Trunk Conference that’s currently going on in San Francisco, Evernote CEO Phil Libin announced the company has acquired popular image sharing service Skitch. Skitch is a drawing tool for OS X that allows users to make quick edits and leave annotations on screenshots to share online with their friends and colleagues. The Mac app has got direct Twitter integration, it supports drag & drop and it can instantly send screenshots on to the web that anyone will be able to see with a browser. We had a review of Skitch for Mac last year, although the app has been improved a lot since then and given a new price point on the Mac App Store.
Following this acquisition, the price is the first thing that will change for Skitch. As part of Evernote, Skitch will be available for free on the Mac App Store, with no ads and no trials; existing Skitch users will be able to keep using the service with their accounts, though new users will get the possibility of signing up using their Evernote credentials. Evernote is promising “tighter integration between Evernote and Skitch” to “easily draw, ink, grab screenshots, annotate and share your favorite memories” – admittedly, as a long-time Evernote user, being able to edit and annotate images in a notebook has always been something I wished Evernote would do besides rich text editing and tagging. All Things Digital is also reporting an Android app will be launched soon, with Skitch for iOS and Windows to follow.
We were drawn to Skitch (har har) for one simple reason: we love and use their product with Evernote. For years, one of our most requested feature areas has been related to improved handling of images and annotation capabilities. Our users take and share millions of photos and screenshots already, but the experience isn’t as good as it could be. We debated about whether to add the improved functionality into Evernote or build a separate app to handle it. Finally, we decided to do both. Thanks to Skitch, we will.
According to Evernote, the engineers at the two companies will be working closely in the coming months to deeply integrate Skitch and Evernote with each other, as right now the only way to let the apps communicate on a Mac is by annotating an image in Skitch, and manually drag it into Evernote. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the app gained a feature to push annotations to Evernote’s cloud to avoid drag & drop – considering the app is coming to mobile devices, this has been certainly considered by the Evernote team. At the moment of writing this Skitch is still a paid app on the Mac App Store, so check back for changes soon to download it for free. We’re looking forward to whatever the Evernote team has in store for Skitch integration in their products – in the meantime, you can read the full announcement here.
Update: Skitch is now free on the Mac App Store.
