FlySketch 1.0 by Gus Mueller at Flying Meat, maker of VoodooPad, is a cool new Mac tool for doing screen shots and then drawing on top of them with a nice little set of drawing and texting tools. Lets you adjust the opacity and size of your overlay so that you can see through what you add to the original screenshot underneath. Priced for the impulse buy at $19.95.
Flying Meat's sales pitch is: "Draw, highlight, everywhere." The FlySketch window can float above your other apps any time you want by clicking the keyboard shortcut of your choice. With it's adjustable transparency, it feels kind of like a resizeable magnifying glass that you are moving around the screen.
FlySketch has a basic line drawing tool with optional arrow head(s) and a highlighter that can do any color highlight. There's a workflow menu which can do all sorts of tricks with other applications and remember the action so it can do it again next time you need the same thing. I haven't tried out the scripting piece yet but was able to send the graphic I created to a new email in one command.
As a FileMaker software developer, I can see using FlySketch for both my user manual and user support. I can quickly markup a screenshot of my product to explain something and then in one click get it into an email. That's going to be handy.
This is an obvious blogging tool. And the more our work goes online and is delivered by email, FTP or what have you, the more an ultra-light-weight, work-anywhere annotation tool like this makes sense. I've got Snapz Pro X and Fireworks already, but I'm betting I'll use FlySketch more often than either of them due to its simplicity and convenience. This is a tool that won't slow me down with its complexity.