I have yet to make it through a week without hearing a, “Hey! Check this out!” from Ronan. He’s always experimenting with new web-based applications and tools so normally I (politely and tactfully) pretend I didn’t hear him.

Last week, however, he had included some very nicely annotated screenshots in an email and I asked what kind of screen capture tool he had used. Turns out there’s a hot little beta called Skitch, currently invite-only, from the crew at plasq.

This app allows you to quickly and easily grab screenshots, camera shots, or import existing images/PDFs and annotate them quickly and easily with a small but well-chosen toolset - I love the arrows. Resizing and cropping is a breeze, although I’d love to see them allow user-entered dimensions rather than having to click and drag. The final image can be saved to your Skitch user account (think Flickr minus most of the features), dragged into any application, or saved out in a variety of formats including PDF, TIF, and SVG.

This last week I’ve used Skitch in quite a few ways:

• During a competitive analysis presentation, I was able to quickly grab screenshots, annotate them with arrows, and drag the shots directly into Keynote without having to save each one out individually (behind the scenes Skitch actually does save them temporarily as *.pict files, so there’s no quality issue when moving from Keynote to Powerpoint or vice versa).
• When responding with comments to an image, Skitch opened the PDF file and let me comment directly on it. The end result was a clear and easy-understandable response that took a fraction of the time it would have taken me via email.
• Omnigraffle Pro and Skitch make a great combination - wireframes saved out in SVG or PICT vector format can be opened directly in Skitch, which I find to be much faster for resizing, writing callouts, and general notes on the original images.

What I can’t describe in this post is how unbelievably slick Skitch is in every interaction. From the tool tips to resizing and anti-aliasing, each task feels responsive and tight. This is one application that has already made its way into my box o’ tricks and will stay there well after the beta period.