Last June I received an invite to try out Skitch by Plasq. It wasn’t long before I was hooked on it, randomly creating sketches such as this one…

There’s a bunch more here.

Because I’ve been playing with this for a while I’ve wrongly assumed that everyone on the tubes already knows about this fantastic app. Skitch is now public beta (Mac) so you can grab a download without an invite, here. So, what does it do? This from the Skitch site…

• Snap a website
• Capture a chat moment
• Screenshot an application
• iSight snap your bad hair day
• Quickly sketch an idea
• Tap into your iPhoto Library
• Re-open images from your Skitch History
• Annotate with circles and gorgeous arrows
• Add text that always stands out
• Scribble and jot… it’s automatically smoothed
• Re-size and crop by simply dragging a corner
• Drag the file to wherever you like, no need to save
• Return to what you were doing — in seconds — not minutes!

You can also upload your creations in one-click via the Skitch interface so you can put it directly on Skitch.com, Flickr, .Mac account or your own webspace. If all that wasn’t enough you can now post your creations to Twitter via your Skitch.com page *and* e-mail pictures via your iPhone, Blackberry, Gmail, Hotmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Entourage and more, using MailDrop.

Another of Plasq’s creations that I am currently using with a 30-day trial is Comic Life. This is available for Mac and PC. It’s a very cool app to quickly create comic strips, picture albums and basically as much as your imagination will let you. You can check out this little creation of mine. I think it’s likely I will purchase it after the trial as I can think of many occasions that this will be very useful.