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(Archived) Skitch And Evernote: A Letter From Keith Lang


gbarry

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We've owed Skitch 1.X users a more thorough explanation on the plans with Skitch 2.0, the direction, the how, the why, etc. Read almost any post related to Skitch Mac in this space and you can immediately tell that we've walked back on many users workflows in Skitch 1.X even while (as I've maintained--and will continue to maintain) we've made strong improvements in 2.0.

Keith Lang, one of Skitch's founders, has a new post up on the Evernote blog. Please take a moment to read it, digest it, and let us know what you think. This is a direct response to many of your concerns below. We've been watching, reading, and taking all of your points into consideration even as we began to make developmental changes to 2.0 in response to your feedback. You may not always get an immediate answer, but you will always get a considered answer once we've had time to work through the details.

http://blog.evernote.com/2012/11/21/skitch-and-evernote-a-letter-from-keith-lang/

Feel free to sound off below. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

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Thanks Martin. We've got a lot of work to do, we hear you guys. Just like you, we're all eager to see Skitch for Mac be as great as it has been/can be. Skitch betas come out before each new release — this is where feedback has most short-term practical impact, and we really appreciate the all the feedback you've been giving on those (across all platforms) too.

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Storage, synchronization and sharing options

You can do three things with your documents in Skitch for Mac: (1) sync them to Evernote and make them accessible on every Evernote-enabled device, (2) save them locally to the filesystem so you can do anything you normally do with files, and (3) share them directly via email, Facebook, Twitter and other services. I think that covers the whole gamut. All three options are available now and will be getting easier to use in upcoming releases.

My thought is that #s 1 and 2 should be combined. I should be able to sync my Skitch'd image to Evernote while also being able to do anything I'd normally do with it. I will not be using Skitch 2.0 if the image in Evernote becomes a ".skitch" filetype. It should remain a .jpg (or whatever I choose) with Skitch's editing on top of it, just like it does in v1.

I am not a programmer, but I do not understand why I can do this with Preview, but not Skitch:

1) Add an image to a note in Evernote

2) Right click on the image in Evernote and open with Preview

3) Annotate in Preview

4) Hit command-S

5) See the updated image in my Evernote note

Replace "Preview" with "Skitch" in that list, and that's how image files should be treated by Skitch.

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  • Level 5

Thanks @klang. I just hope wider lessons have been learned from this: For quite a few Evernote family product releases recently there've been similarish receptions. It's not just yours (which was one of the most strident). As someone who uses quite a lot of the family members - on multiple platforms - this has become obvious to me. I'm not sure if it's obvious to people working on one or only a few of the family members. (And I'm not expecting an answer on that one.)

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Thanks @klang. I just hope wider lessons have been learned from this: For quite a few Evernote family product releases recently there've been similarish receptions. It's not just yours (which was one of the most strident). As someone who uses quite a lot of the family members - on multiple platforms - this has become obvious to me. I'm not sure if it's obvious to people working on one or only a few of the family members. (And I'm not expecting an answer on that one.)

Definitely agree with Martin! I downloaded the Evernote service Windows client beta ~April 2008 but really only started using it in October 2008. I truly do use multiple times EVERY SINGLE HOUR I'm on my computer which is about 8-10 hours 6 days a week & have been a premium user for over three years. Once the "add more space" option was available to Premium EN users, I've utilized that about five times as well & I feed a lot of other stuff into it from my iPhone & iPad & by auto forwarding select emails from my ISP. So, as a long time user of the EN service and a long time, often criticized defender of EN on the message board, it's been impossible to overlook the multitude of negative reviews on the latest releases of Skitch, iOS & Mac. I only use Skitch "lightly" on my iPad and that still works for me. (Mostly to annotate a screen cap taken on my iPad & then send it to Evernote.) Since EN on iOS is so damned slow, I've nothing one way or the other to say about that b/c I haven't really used it. I rely upon third party apps that integrate with EN instead. And...I don't use a Mac. It sure seems there have been a few clusterfks with recent EN product releases & I'm just hoping the Windows client is not going to be yet another one.

(I know this is OT but hey... :P )

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Agreeing with Martin & BurgersNFries here. I am a Evernote power-user of just over 2 years - went Premium within a week or so of trying it out. I love Evernote but the additional products have had me wondering about Evernote's quality control for quite a while now. Evernote Hello and Evernote Food are ridiculous - especially how poorly they integrate into Evernote itself.

@klang - I appreciated your well thought out post and can understand the pressures of pushing a product out onto so many platforms and devices. I hope Skitch improves. I have to admit that I downloaded it, tried to use it, and it was so slow and cumbersome that I removed the program entirely. Maybe I completely missed something important about it, but it seems that Preview (on Mac) does the same things faster.

I love Evernote and tend to be a very "loyal" type of person so I like to support a company that I like by using their products. My encouragement to everyone at Evernote - Stop trying to push so many different products out so fast. Take Time. Develop them well, test them in beta, refine, test, refine and THEN introduce them.

Things like Evernote Hello, Evernote Food, and sorry but Skitch 2.0 too, besmirch Evernote's reputation. Having Phil Libin gush over them in blog posts and videos has only made me distrust him. I am sad about that because I had a lot of respect for the guy but now barely read his stuff about new products because he will claim they are the best thing since sliced cheese no matter how weak the product is.

On a positive note - so far I love the changes you have made in Evernote 5. Evernote 5 is what I am talking about. It seems like the Evernote Mac/iOS team(s) worked their butts off for a long time AND did not release the product until it was ready and works very well. I hope Evernote will take a page out of that success story and apply it to the rest of the products.

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As a user who has started with Skitch on Android, then Windows, I don't have the luxury of knowing what it was like before now, but as it is right now, I am loving it.

Before the windows version, I would (especially here) take screenshots and then send them (through EN) to my tablet and edit them with skitch there. Now, I can use both. :)

Now, I know people weren't happy that certain features were removed, but to me, it seems like (and I could be completely off base here) that to get the integration with Evernote right, it all had to start from scratch building the integration as the backbone.

Now that that seems to be done, more features (and some of the older ones) have begun to make their way back into skitch. (For example features that were in original versions of skitch (andriod) and are now returning, like the "Wet Ink" feature)

So, a happy Skitch user here, and looking forward to all the cool things mentioned in the blog post. (Manned mission to mars huh? :P)

Scott

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@mrgoerend We're working to make that flow be how you expect it. Currently this kind of flow results in 2 copies of the image in your Evernote account, so it's a bit odd.

@Viv Ilo Veith thanks for the words of encouragement. We've got some steady, regular releases planned ahead of us to polish, polish, polish. For example, late yesterday we found a speed enhancement which makes moving and repositioning objects noticeably smoother across all the Apple platforms. I understand what you mean.

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback.

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Archived

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