Transparent Highlighter's color settings annoying to use

[Nimai 1]

Hi

Just started using skitch for pdf and in general it's good.  Number one annoyance however is the behaviour of the marker tool.  Each time you switch away from it and back again it defaults to the yellow colour which is kinda ugly.  The other tools retain their colour and size preferences as you would expect so is this just an oversight?? 

 

Also, randomly, if you set the text size for the text tool to small, the size for the highlighter tool changes to small as well.  This makes it annoying to annotate and highlight pdf's.  Why retain the size setting between the two tools but change colour?? Why are these settings even linked? It seems inconsistent 

[Nimai 1]

Further, why am I not able to choose the colours in the color drawer?  It seems pointlessly restricting for what would otherwise be a great tool

[Jer Villanueva 6]

Hi Nimai, thanks for the feedback!

 

Yes, currently the highlighter tool defaults to yellow whenever it is selected. The idea behind it is that we needed the highlighter to have a color that emphasizes the text it's highlighting without drowning it out. Yellow works in most cases so we settled on that. We may change this behavior in the future so if you have a specific recommendation or preference, please tell us about it.

 

About your second post, even though the tool defaults to yellow, you should be able to change the color after you've selected it. If that doesn't work, that is a bug and I would like to get some more information so I can reproduce the issue on my end.

[Nimai 1]

Hi Jer, thanks for your reply!

 

The yellow colour looks dull across the different screens I use it on (MBP retina, ipad, iphone) and it would be handy to either be able to customise the default colour or have it remember the colour last selected for the highlighter tool and switch back to that.  This would at least allow the user to select their favoured colour without having to navigate through the colour draw each time they change tool.

 

I understand that in many cases opinionated software works great in that it's less one choice that the end user needs to worry about so they can get on with the task at hand, however colours are such a personal decision, it strikes me as something that should be easily customisable by the end user. Especially when much of the tool's usage is to highlight personal notes and pdf's.

 

The second post was referring to the choice of the six colours in the draw.  If I could change the shade of yellow or orange (it looks brown on my laptop but orange on my ipad), then that would at least ameliorate the problem in the first post.  Minor points but I have to spend a lot of time reading journal articles and find the colour selection strategy a bit of an annoying paper cut type problem in an otherwise awesome piece of technology

 

Anyway, thanks for listening to my grumps.  I'm a big evernote fan and have been telling everyone at work about it.  

[Nimai 1]

For the record, my "use case/way I use highlighting and text in evernote" is generally I try and highlight an important point in a colour and then summarise or add extra notes using the text tool in the same colour, like I would if I was using highlighting pens in real life.  

 

It's strange that switching between tools maintains the size setting but changes colours.  Generally I use small text to fit extra in the margins of the document and larger marker size to highlight lines.  I can see why this behaviour might work using the marker and text tools together on an image, but it's not great for highlighting pdf's with highlighter and text tool.

[Jer Villanueva 6]

Hello Nimai, thanks for responding.

 

Ahh I see what you mean about the colors. There are plans to add a color picker to the desktop client so that you can annotate with your preferred colors, so this feature may be coming soon. Thanks for expounding on how you think the highlighters ought to work. That's an interesting use case, using colors to match text to highlighted passages, and I could see that being useful. I'm taking note of that.

 

I really appreciate the constructive criticism! It's always good to hear about how we can make Skitch better.

[EvanD 0]

I can't get the color to be translucent. It completely obscures the underlying text - AFTER I have hit "return" to finalize my highlight. I don't see any way to adjust the transparency settings.

 

Evan

 

[spanishgringo 1]

the highlighter is not translucent enough either. You should be able to control the level of transparency of the highlight.  The default settings cover up the original image too much instead of highlighting it.