Skitch It Up!
Skitch Inc was formed as a company in 2010 by four partners, including CEO Cris Pearson, but the idea began long before that. It was simple really. The team wanted to create a desktop application for visual communication. With time though, they realized the need for an online version of the tool. We at (mt) Media Temple have been hosting Skitch.com for years now and are delighted to say that they’ve reached Skitch 1.0 after 3 years in Beta. We wanted you to hear more and Cris was kind enough to stop in and answer a few questions.
What Is It?
In your words, what is Skitch?
Skitch is a website and an app, working together to share visual ideas fast. Think of it as your camera for the Internet, letting you snap those interesting little things you see on your online travels. Skitch is used in all kinds of work flows and situations, from architects pointing out important building elements, to developers explaining bugs to team members, to drawing funny faces on a photo of your dog.
What kind of experience do you want Skitch users to have?
Fast & Fun! Speed of interaction has always been key for Skitch. I recently read Fred Wilson saying “First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it.”
Cris, we know you’ve been working tirelessly to get the latest Skitch up and running. Can you give us some background on the origin and gradual maturation of the app?
Skitch was an idea I had back in 2006. Our company at the time, plasq, was dedicated to creating beautiful and fun apps. As a completely remote company, spread across the US, Europe and Australia, we constantly needed to share points visually with each other… so we built Skitch.
At first it was a simple little red frame that let you screen grab, draw and drag the result as a file. Soon it became a ‘Swiss Army knife’ of image capture, markup and sharing. We realized the general public might like it, and so we released it to the public as a beta.
Over the beta period, we rebuilt skitch.com from the ground up, realizing we wanted to take this on full time. Skitch was formed as a completely separate company. At the end of last year we released the 1.0 of Skitch.app and skitch.com and are very proud of how it turned out.
What’s New?
Your model seems to have shifted to a “cloudier”, more community oriented online presence. What prompted this shift?
The need for greater collaboration features around Skitch prompted this addition however it’s really just the first step towards where we aim to be. Our image sharing was pretty bare bones until the recent relaunch. We also added the ability to follow people on skitch.com so you can keep up to date on what they are sharing.
Specifically, what features have you added to make Skitch more attractive or usable?
We’re really proud of new Sharing work flow. It’s possible to share an image, tag it, add a description, and tweet it all from inside the application. It’s a great time saver. Plus users will also receive access to the spiffy, new, full-length web capture feature.
This is your first foray into a premium option (a non-free option). How’s the reception been to this change?
It’s been mixed, but that’s always the case with change. We’ve had some people tell us that they just want to pay for the desktop app, and never share images online. Others have congratulated us on the release, saying team collaboration is their main use for Skitch. Online is where we’ll be spending most of our time though.
Can you outline the benefits your consumers get from paying for “Skitch Plus”?
Sure! On the Mac desktop side, Skitch Plus users have the ability to get image links dropped directly into their clipboard, including the direct link if they want. They can capture full-length web pages using our built-in webkit rendering, and resize with presets. Online, they get unlimited image-dashboard access, image size uploads, and image sets. We’ve got more features to come for Plus users, including handy image view statistics. The entire experience is also ad-free for Plus users and their guest viewers.
What’s Behind It?
Skitch is not something you can launch on a simple server and call it a day. Can you talk about the planning invested in scaling Skitch? What were some of the primary challenges in scaling an app with such a large audience?
We knew from day one that we needed to make this system scalable. The Skitch platform represents many, many years of work by our great Scandinavian web team as well as other contributors from around the world.
Our platform is now made up entirely of the new (ve) servers making it possible for us to automate most of the scaling process. We can even upgrade and downgrade (ve) servers on the fly with automated hot reconfiguration. This means we have fast access to fully redundant pools of servers for the many different aspects of our web app such as application servers, image servers, caches, static content, gearman management, worker nodes, database servers, and backup processes.
We are utilizing hot fail-over and load balancing solutions provided by (mt) for scaling both our application server pools and our image servers, so adding or removing nodes can be done with a few keystrokes or clicks. Open Source monitoring systems running on dedicated (ve) nodes provides valuable feedback on our scaling quality, and alerts us to both excessive use from single users, as well as certain server clusters that might need a new or larger node.
As an infrastructure provider and partner, has (mt) helped your company grow?
Here’s the thing: What we’ve learnt is that in a complex system (like image hosting) things will inevitably go wrong at any hour of the day. Because our users are all over the world, it means a lot when we can call (mt) at 4am knowing a team of knowledgeable people will help us.
… and of course, the power and flexibility of (mt) Media Temple servers go without question. We need this to serve the millions of images we host.
Break Time!
Now you’ve launched, where do you vacation?
Both Keith and I took a little time off after the release. I caught some music festivals, moved house twice and Keith was driving a houseboat on a flooded Murray River here in Australia. We are, however, both very happy to be back working on Skitch!
Thanks to the Skitch Crew!
Cris Pearson, CEO & Designer
Keith Lang, COO & Designer
Øyvind Selbek, Lead Web Developer
Mark Pearson, Customer Happiness Guru
Find them at Skitch.com or @Skitch
