Skitch Takes Another Bullet – Nearly Dead?
I loved Skitch when it came out. I paid for it (twice), I paid for the "Skitch Plus" service - all because I wanted to support the guys making great software for the Mac, and I didn't want them to get bought up and thrown away. This was all before it was even out of beta! And for a while, things were good. But no good deed goes unpunished…
I knew a while back that Evernote bought Skitch and I had a bad feeling about it. Skitch was perfect as it was - small, targeted, and perfectly worked UI for the task at hand. Now it was going to be some uber-thing part of this Evernote suite of products. I had a very bad feeling.
Still, for a while, things didn't change.
Then yesterday I saw this tweet:
and my heart sank. I had to read this blog post to get the real effect of the change.
Skitch is getting even better. Soon sharing in Skitch will go through Evernote so that you will be able to take advantage of Evernote's syncing, searching and sharing features. To do this, we are making a few very important changes.
Yeah, you're trashing it!
So I downloaded the Evernote app… made an account, and started the transition. What I found was that the concept behind Evernote is noble. The implementation is just plain nasty. As in crooked nasty. Selling stuff about me, nasty.
I want to pay for something simple. Something clean. I want to support the developers that make great products, but it's clear that far far too many of the devs for the Mac are really looking for the IPO Cha-Ching!, or the Facebook Buyout. They really aren't into sustainable development and pricing. So they do this.
I will admit that they cleaned up the web page a bit:
but they removed all the good URL links. Why?!
My feeling was they didn't want people hitting their servers for the images like Skitch used to allow. I'm not sure that this is the case, but it sure seems like it. For the time being, I'm going to have to live with this as I have at least found a work-around.
But I'll be writing to Evernote and asking for them to be re-instated. Also, can't they use some better URLs for the images? The image above has a URL that's about 250 chars! Gee whiz!
I'm going to have to start looking around for something else. Maybe I need to look at WebDAV and use Skitch as well, but then I'm a little high-and-dry if I loose something. Not really likely, but it's something to think about.
I really hate this kind of change… it's all about the money - not at all about the supporting users.
UPDATE: I tried very hard to post the images form Evernote to this post, and in every case, it failed miserably. I think the Evernote server is again doing this out of spite for the blogs, as the old Skitch site works well. I'm going to have to look at setting up a WebDAV server on HostMonster just for my Skitch usage. Crud.
UPDATE: I spent more than an hour trying to get WebDAV and SFTP working. I was able to get the server-side config working as Panic's Transmit was fantastic. But it's Skitch. Crud. So I sent off a note to Evernote/Skitch support. I sure hope I get a decent answer soon.
[9/12 4:50am] UPDATE: got this back from Evernote support:
Thank you for contacting us.
At this time, Evernote does not provide a direct link to an image for use in hot linking to other websites as it does not provide web image hosting capabilities like other services. You are able to share the URL of the image as it is stored on Evernote for viewing, which will bring viewers to the Evernote site.
We apologize for this inconvenience,
Jerks. They are purposefully shutting down the Skitch.com site and leaving on this non-functional replacement. Great.
[9/12 7:19am] UPDATE! Success! What I can do is to make a generic, insecure, FTP account and then put that into Skitch, and it will then properly use it. Yes, I'm not happy about FTP versus say, SFTP, but there's not a lot I can do about that. It appears that the code used in Skitch doesn't match up the SSL keys properly, as the log indicates. This means that all I can do is FTP, but at least then all the images are on HostMonster, and that's perfect!