Skitch: A Tale Of Software Unusability

I'm more of a sucker for private betas than I like to admit; I was a beta tester here, for one thing. So when the invites for Plasq's Skitch started rolling around, I thought I'd sign up. I poked a little bit, but the UI repelled me so much I didn't even copy it out of the disk image. This evening, though, I had some ranting go get off my chest, and it seemed best expressed through the medium of boxes drawn over screenshots.

These were some of the things that either I didn't understand, or it didn't do right, when I came to use it.

• There's no Capture Window command. Instead, most of the modes do actually capture a window, but there has to be a window to tell you how.
• Ellipses don't draw from the centre, but from the edge. You can toggle this with Option, but I didn't realise this until far later, after having deleted and started over with about six different shapes.
• Typing automatically moves you to text mode, which is nice, but:
  
• Text captions don't start near your last drawing, but randomly.
• Text isn't submitted with Return (I can understand that) or Enter (I can't; it's underused)
• There's no keyboard shortcut to return to a mode after typing, so you have to mouse
• If you swap colours before you swap tools, you'll set the colour of the current item, not the next one. In fact, I managed to get some blue text, then have it set back to red - the previous colour - for a new ellipse. Baffling.
• Uploading is to MySkitch by default, and:
  
• There's no obvious progress bar (it's actually hiding at the bottom corner of the funky window).
• To get a URL to paste in to IRC, I had to visit the page, then copy out of a text box.
  
• I had a crash while entering my SFTP details
• ... and another when changing the filename and file type
• ... which weren't at all obvious to find (they're in a strange tab at the bottom of the window.
  
• Preferences are on the back of the main application window, in a stupid Sun Java Desktop style.
• The Share button didn't put the URL to the image into the clipboard, so I had to construct it myself.
• After clicking Share, the button reverts to Webload. Five copies of one image? Ta!
• File > Save As... only saves .skitch format.
• There's no File > Export. Instead, you have to do Acorn-style direct file manipulation
• ...and it doesn't even have the decency to use a standard proxy icon
• ...so you're waving around a huge semi-transparent version of your picture.
  

Deep breath.

Looking at this more sensibly, a lot of the complaints are probably unfamiliarity. The thing is, Mac software is meant to be consistent, usable, and somewhat familiar. If there hadn't been so many stupid interface geegaws and instead some more pedestrian UI choices, rather than going for some "cute chrome" - things like a progress bar, and a standard preferences window, for example - then I'd probably have embraced Skitch the same way all the blogging pundits seem to. As it is, though, it's destined to go back into its disk image, get ejected, and used once in a while, no doubt accompanied by gnashing of teeth.