Evernote proves that you can ruin a fantastic product much loved by all in one version release – Skitch

I normally avoid complaining about updates to software as its one of those things that you need to handle in order to be up-to-date with the rest of the world but on this occasion I am well pissed.

All of us at the office have used Skitch since it first came out and LOVED the way it made screen captures a breeze on MAC.

As a developer I was amazed at the perfection of this piece of software – the UI was perfect, there were no bugs, simple functions that provided us with all of our needs – simple yet powerful summed up this product.

Today I downloaded version 2 of Skitch from the MAC store excited at what awesome features they had added only to find out that Evernote, that brought this piece of software, had somehow completely rooted it by taking out the very features we loved.

The UI sucks, the icon on the top bar is not there anymore – there are more horrific amputations as this post documents.

This was the way we, and many others looking at the comments in forums, used Skitch to take screen dumps – via the icon on the top bar.

I am now also constantly ‘encouraged’ to signup to Evernote to share my Skitch images. I am not sure how many people do share their Skitch images in this way but we don’t. We use Skitch to take screen captures and email them to each other or clients. Its bloody helpful when you need to show a client what button to push or what fields to fill in.

When comparing the two versions: pre-Evernote and post-Evernote I cannot imagine how they could have stuffed it up more. Its like a bunch of chimpanzees took a stick to it and beat all the good shit out of it and what remains is proudly presented as ‘Version 2’ when in fact its more like ‘Version -100’.

At a guess Evernote brought this piece of software to harvest the users of Skitch and ‘divert’ them to Evernote’s online sharing community. This comment from the linked post above seems to sum up Evernote’s attempts at raping good quality software.

The end of an era. Evernote — not understanding what users actually appreciated it for — has killed Skitch, and turned its vapors into something else entirely. This redesign has not only remove it’s personality, it has removed so many unique features. Such a shame.I will hold onto my copy of 1.0.12 for as long as possible, and begin exploring alternatives.

So if you are one of those poor soles who downloaded this version and started to cry I suggest you use a tool like ‘CleanMyMAC’ and wipe the mistake from your machine and download the pre-Evernote version here.

If any of you are trying to make sense of my rant and have a take-away then its this…

If you purchase a business or product to add to your own offerings then please research the existing customers to see if you should mess with it. Evernote clearly did not or don’t care and thats why we are looking for an alternative to Skitch.