When your favorite app gets bought by a bigger company, you have good reason to fear for its life. But when that company is Evernote, something different happens. The app sticks around, and it gets better. On Wednesday, Skitch came to the iPhone, and it syncs everywhere through Evernote. Now you can annotate your images from anywhere.
Skitch was beloved by many before Evernote bought it. It’s one of the quickest, sharpest tools for cropping, resizing, highlighting and annotating images. You can add text, boxes or arrows, whatever you need. And Evernote has preserved most of those features. It even made the full version of the app free, shipped an Android version, and launched an iPad version in December, which on Wednesday became a universal app.
That doesn’t mean all has gone smoothly for Skitch’s happy pre-Evernote users. Evernote has removed some tools, like translucent colors and paint bucket, although it has added new ones, like highlighting and pixellation for blurring out details.
Evernote has also shut down the Skitch.com service for editing notes via the Web, moving the sync over to your Evernote notebooks instead.
That’s actually a great update for Evernote users, but for people who use Skitch but not Evernote, it can result in unfortunate situations like this:
It’s no fun to have a tool you use daily change underneath you. But it could be much worse. When Google buys a great third-party app like the Gmail client Sparrow, the new management tends to kill it stone dead.
In the case of Skitch, as well as handwriting app Penultimate, yes, things will change. But the core usefulness of the app remains, and it gains the advantages of being searchable and shareable in Evernote across platforms. But you don’t even have to use the standalone Evernote app to use it, though I’m not sure why you wouldn’t.
Evernote wants to be your personal (or shared) external memory, and it wants to work on every device on every platform and last 100 years. Handy apps could find a much worse home than Evernote.
