I recently discovered Skitch and have been raving about it as an Image Markup application. I’ve now also discovered that the Aviary suite also has an Image Markup tool called Falcon that works inside the browser and is coupled with a Firefox extension called Talon for quickly accessing the tools required to do a snapshot. This got me very excited as although I love Skitch for what it does and how well it does it the allure of doing the same thing completely in the browser was too much to ignore. So I’ve done some tests and here are my thoughts.

The Aviary Firefox plugin is great and allows you to launch your Aviary apps via a neat little menu bar button (although I wish it stuck to the design of the other buttons). The snapshot options allow you to choose a section of the screen, the visible area and also the entire page including the complete drop. This is also available in another plugin called Screengrab! and was a very useful way of viewing the design of a site outside of the browser. You can grab sites you admire. Like this one.

The first thing I noticed was that after selecting my snapshot area and hitting the save button it launched Aviary’s default Image editor Phoenix. I then had to save and create a file to open in Falcon. When I did eventually get to edit my image in Falcon I found it to be pretty much the same as Skitch as far as toolset and styling. Performance wasn’t as fast as Skitch overall but this is due to the Flash player and being inside the browser. Personally, this is the biggest issue though. For what I need to do with a tool like this the overall experience was too time consuming and I will be sticking to Skitch for the time being.

This is not to say that the Aviary suite will not be used. It’s important to remember that the Aviary snap will allow you to quickly get a screengrab into a very powerful suite of applications so if your work involves a bit more than just making notes and drawing arrows then this will be the better option. For example, if you were a designer working on some branding ideas and had snapped a logo you liked for inspiration you could very quickly get that snapshot into Raven (Aviary’s vector editor) and draw some curves out over the logo; rapidly generating some ideas for use later. Photographers could grab a snapshot of a photo from a site and open it in Peacock (the effects editor) so they could quickly play with some effects and ideas to use in their own work.

Aviary – I would allow users to login via the Firefox extension and set Falcon as an option when opening your snapshot.
Skitch – something I’d like to see in your tool as it stands is the ability to select an area or the entire snap and scale it up WITHOUT interpolation. I need to zoom in to show individual pixels sometimes.

Another feature I would love to see in any of these tools is the ability to draw a rect around an area of the snapshot and automatically render the rect’s dimensions in pixels next to the rect area. Sometimes I want to measure an area of the screen. The same kind of tool for stamping out the HEX colour of the pixel I’ve clicked on with an accompanying arrow or crosshair. This would be a great way for designers to deliver their designs to developers with dimensions and colour values all set out for them.

http://aviary.com/tools

http://skitch.com

UPDATE:
doodle.png on Aviary.
The plugin is available here.