Remember line thickness

[nwinkler 2]

One thing that greatly annoys me is that Skitch doesn't remember some of the settings. When drawing a rectangle, I always have to change the line thickness to the smallest setting. When Skitch starts, it always starts with the line thickness set to medium.

 

Why can't Skitch remember some of the settings? Like I said, the line thickness is one of them, but I'm sure there's more. From what I've seen, the selected color is always reset to red when starting Skitch. It would be nice if Skitch remembered what I set when using it last so I don't have to change the tool settings every time.

 

[Juzzi 0]

I agree with nwinkler that Skitch should remember user last used settings in line thickness. I also think that it should remember all your last settings e.g. shape (rectangle, circle, line…), highlight style, color and line thickness.

I must say that is annoying to change these basic settings every single time when you are using the software. Even better if these settings were stored to cloud. So, if I use my laptop and later I change to my desktop computer it will pick settings which I have used earlier in my laptop. It's much better to offer user latest settings than default settings.

[Joe Lopez 108]

@nwinkler & Juzzi - The reset to default is a design decision. Images come in all types and colors and it is virtually impossible to guarantee that a particular color/thickness will be readable on all backgrounds. Our pink color is one of the best for showing up in many situations (we've done a lot of testing on colors), but even then it isn't always right for the background image. As it stands right now we'd rather have users at least have a higher probability the default color will work, then forcing them to always change the last remembered setting because it doesn't work for a new image (which would be the same thing as changing it for the default).

 

That said, we're working on a design which would remember the default setting and/or let users set their own defaults. I can't promise when this might be released, but it is something we are looking into. 

[nwinkler 2]

Thanks for the reply. While I agree that it's virtually impossible to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution, at least let me have the settings that work for me most of the time.

 

I mostly use Skitch for annotating screenshots, and in 99% of the cases, I use the default red/pink color (good choice on that one!), but I always have to change the width to the smallest setting. I then either use a rectangle, or an arrow to point to something.

 

Based on this, remembering my last settings (for line width) would work for most of my use cases - and I guess this would be similar for many other people.

 

Again, I think you've made a great choice on the default color - it works really well for most cases, but the line width/thickness being reset is pretty annoying. I've never had a case where I actually used the default line width - for most of my use cases it's far too thick.

[Joe Lopez 108]

@newinkler - Can you post a link to a sample image that you would normally use that requires you to adjust the line thickness?

What app do you normally use take/make the image?

[nwinkler 2]

Sure - please take a look at the attached screenshots, which really are just some examples. In most cases I'm annotating either some screenshots of web pages from Chrome, where I want to highlight some text or an area of the screen, or I'm annotating some text, either from Chrome's JavaScript console, from a text editor, or from an IDE like WebStorm.

 

In most cases the default line thickness is too strong, so it's covering other parts of the screen that I actually want to leave visible.

 

Take a look at the samples, the one with the thin lines looks more elegant and is easier to read, while the other one with the strong lines is hard to read and obscures some of the other content. Most of the time, I find the thick lines distracting and too much "in your face" (for lack of a better word). The thinner lines still stick out enough for people to notice, but still let you see the rest of the content.

 

 

 

[Juzzi 0]

Like mentioned earlier in this post: there isn't optimal solution for every user. Unless system will offer you your last used settings and tools by default (with cloud storage option ). I think that this way you can cover easily 80-90% of user needs and use case scenarios.

 

I think that majority of users are using skitch for most of the times similar way that they used it for last time. If you are coder you need a thinner lines and if you edit hi-resolution photos you might need thicker lines etc.

 

Anyway +1 to Evernote development team to listen your active customers and try to improve your usability. I think that usability is the "only thing" that matters in the long run.

[Joe Lopez 108]

@nwinkler - Thanks for the examples and explanation. Useful information for us.

 

@Juzzi - While your assumption is good, the data we collect does not actually prove that out. You would be surprised at how few people use every feature in Skitch. There's a reason the new iOS version defaults to arrow and text as the main tools when doing a Quick Snap. 

 

That said these are good examples for us. It's pretty rare that I highlight something with the box tool and want the surrounding text visible, if I want to do that I use the highlighter, or an arrow with some text. These are good examples for us to take into consideration. 

[daneb 0]

One of the many reasons I delayed upgrading to version 2.x for so long. Even now, after using 2.x for about a month straight (my longest streak ever), I'm considering going back to 1.x. If it's a design decision, great, at least make it available to remember last used settings as a preference. I can't think of any good app that auto-reverts settings like that. 

 

I loved Skitch 1.x because it was lightweight but provided a lot of options, yet maintained simplicity for those that wanted it. 2.x has come a long way, but there's still a lot of those legacy features like remembering line thickness and color that a lot of us want back.

[Juzzi 0]

I just downloaded the latest version of Skitch (2.7.1). Line thickness and last used colour is stored to app. Fantastic!! Thank you!

 

This is so good improvement that in normal situation you don't even noticing it unless someone will change it to be worse than earlier.