At first, the marriage between Skitch and Evernote looked like a perfect match, but after Evernote launched the completely redesigned Skitch 2.0 for Mac, the company faced quite a bit of backlash as the new version did away with Skitch’s idiosyncratic design and many of its most popular features. Today, Skitch co-founder Keith Lang posted an apology on the Evernote blog and outlined the company’s plans to get Skitch 2.0 to the point where it becomes “the more appealing choice” for die-hard fans of the previous version.
Here is part of what Lang has to say about the update:
I am really excited about the newest release of Skitch for Mac, but troubled by some of the negative reaction from some of our oldest and most loyal users. After thinking about this for the past few weeks, I realized that we’ve underestimated how deeply ingrained Skitch had become into many people’s daily workflows and how disruptive even small changes could be. We’re going to fix it.
The previous version of the app, Lang says, “was being held together by five years of duct-tape and good intentions.” To move forward, the entire app had to be rewritten. To turn the application into a modern Mac program, the team had to start from scratch.
Looking ahead, though, the Skitch team plans to reinstate a number of 1.x features that the community has been most vocal about. Among these are FTP/sFTP uploads, the ability to automatically create sharing URLs, short URLs, direct hosting of Skitch images, multiple fonts and custom colors, streamlined cropping and resizing and automatic type tool selection. That, combined with some of the changes the company made in version 2.02, should go a long way to make Skitch 1.x users happy.
In addition, Lang writes, the team is also working “on some really amazing stuff that should appeal to our most loyal users as well as bring in many millions of new fans.”