It's Magiq day. First announced and demoed at Macworld Expo in January, and eagerly awaited by doodlers everywhere: Plasq's new evolution in the Comic Life product line, Comic Life Magiq, is shipping now. Magiq is not an upgrade to Comic Life, which is still sold separately -- it's a whole new tool, including an embedded image editor and pro-level layout and masking components. A slew of new templates and a Core Animation-driven UI complete the package.

As you might surmise, CLM is a Leopard-only Universal Binary release (it actually calls for 10.5.2 as a minimum OS version). A full license is $45 and cross-grades from Comic Life (including the bundled version that shipped with some Macs) are $30; however, for a limited time you can get a license for $40 and a crossgrade for $20. A 30-day unlimited demo can be downloaded from plasq.com now.

We're looking forward to some hands-on Magiq time and posting some screenshots later today.

Click To Play

It's no big secret we love the funky look and wonderfully simple apps that come from the Plasq team. And there's no denying that Comic Life was a big hit for them. To follow that act they've been working on Comic Life Magiq, which we only had a taste of so far, but it looks just as funky and useful as you'd expect from these guys. Check out one of those age-old photo tasks: cutting a person out of a background. They actually make it look fun.

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Skitch is one of our favorite apps here at TUAW. In case you haven't heard of it, Skitch is a very cool screen capturing app that makes it easy to capture stuff on your Mac's screen, do some basic editing, and then share it with your friends via FTP, Flickr, or Skitch's own service.

Skitch has been in private beta since Macworld 2007, but now you can get your hands on a beta version of your very own. My Mac has become ten times more useful to me with Skitch installed, so do yourself a favor and get this app posthaste.

We tease the Plasq crew for their taste in outerwear, but their taste in software is impeccable. Announced at the show: open beta of our fave Skitch, upcoming add-on to 'expert' version of Comic Life (Comic Life Magiq, a separate product from the original Comic Life), and an entirely new application based on the Skitch vector engine: Doozla, a $25 children's art application that's simple and clean. Keith demos Doozla and the alpha of CL Magiq in the video below (after the jump).

[Update 2: The invite window is now closed! Thanks for participating everyone, invites should be sent out soon!

[Update: The plasq folks have informed us that the response to this invite offer has been absolutely amazing; well over 1000 requests. The good news? They have agreed to send invites out to every genuine request they have received so far. Cut off point is 12pm PST today. Your invite should be on its way later today or early tomorrow!]

We've been talking up Skitch - a fantastic and powerful screenshot snapping and sharing app from plasq - for quite some time here on TUAW (if you want to take a peek, watch this video tour of Skitch in action). The only problem is: since its introduction at Macworld '07, it's either been in a private beta or, more recently, a tight invite-only public beta, making it hard to get your hands on a copy. Fortunately, all that finally changes today for 1000 of you - because we have a big ol' batch of invites to give away! Amidst all the time they're spending on polishing Skitch, their MySkitch picture sharing service (for the record: Skitch works with Flickr and even .Mac as well), and a new m.myskitch.com site they launched just in time for the iPhone, the kind crew at plasq were awesome enough to give us 1000 invites to give to you, our dear TUAW readers! As icing on the cake, they made the process about as easy as it can get by putting together an automated invite system: simply email [sorry, invites are now closed] from the address you want tied to your Skitch account, and you're done! Wait a little while for your sweet, sweet Skitch beta invite to arrive, and soon you can be Skitchin' and sharin' with the rest of us.

Please help us make this a great experience for everyone. Companies run beta invites like this not only to help generate buzz for the product, but to ensure that they can sustain their services and provide a solid software experience for everyone. Don't send multiple emails from different addresses or re-send your request. We've never done a beta invite this way before, but the plasq crew know what they're doing and you'll receive your invite soon enough. With that said - go get Skitchin'!

Click To Play

Skitch is the latest app from the boys of Plasq, makers of the hugely popular Comic Life. If you've never seen it in action, take a few to check out the simple yet powerful interface.

We may have been playing with Skitch and teasing you with screenshot galleries since the app's debut at Macworld '07, but today is the day that some of you can finally start teasing someone else for a change. That's right: the plasq crew have officially opened the flood gates and have begun sending out Skitch beta copies to users who signed up (you can now sign up at the official Skitch site). Not everyone will receive their copy right away, mind you: by 'invite-only public beta,' I mean that copies will more or less be sent out at a moderate but steady pace and only to those who sign up, as plasq wants to make sure they can maintain control over testing (after all: it is still a beta) and ensure their slick MySkitch photo sharing service can handle the load.

That said, if you get a copy, start testing away! It's a beta, so it'll act funny and it just might eat the family cat. Just remember: Skitch will be a commercial app when released as a 1.0 (though no official word on price yet), and the plasq crew is still kicking around whether they need to split some services or features off into a Pro version, so send in that feedback.

Notwithstanding the pre-beta Skitch product announcement, the Plasq crew have been busy as beavers (despite having never met in person before Macworld; talk about your distributed development teams) on their already-released products. Comic Life 1.3 is out for download now and includes:

• Visual preview of styles
  
• an "Email" button to send comics directly from Mail.app, Entourage, Eudora or AOL
  
• Publish your comic to iWeb
• Copy and paste Comic Life elements to other apps
• Speech and thought balloons now have "Multi-tail" capability :-)
  
• Multiple images per panel

and more. CL 1.3 requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher; the upgrade is a free download for owners of the retail, Deluxe or bundled editions.

Thanks Matthew!

As a blogger here on TUAW I probably take an unusually high number of screenshots. I always have Grab and ImageWell running, so I can snag some pics of websites or of apps in action. That is, I always had Grab/ImageWell running, until I visited Plasq's booth on the Macworld showfloor.

Move over ImageWell: I have a new love, and its name is Skitch. Skitch is currently in a very private beta (we're talking single digit users at the moment), but the good folks at Plasq assure me that more info will be available next week. Skitch simplifies the way you take screenshots on your Mac. Think of it as a WYSIWYG screenshot taker (that's What You See Is What You Get) with the added bonus of making uploading those pics to a remote server (via FTP, SFTP, .Mac, or Flickr to name a few) dead simple. And it doesn't stop there; Skitch can also take pictures using your iSight and allows you to add text, doodles, and arrows to those images (and each of those elements is inserted onto its own layer, but Skitch handles all that... you need not interact directly with the layers).

Read on for a screenshot, though it really doesn't tell the whole story of this innovative UI.

When it comes to software on the Mac platform it's a mixed bag. I don't mean like on Windows, where the bag is full of snakes, scorpions, rusty blades, and the occasional bit of peach. Software on the Mac has been in flux for a decade. When Apple bought NeXT, most of us figured Copland was dead in the water (and it was). Personally, I wish we'd seen OpenDoc come to fruition, but that comes from years of dealing with bloatware. OS X pushed the "Classic" Mac OS further and further into the shadows, until, with the advent of Intel Macs, it's pretty much dying off... Read the fine print on these Leopard features for developers, and you'll realize how dead "Classic" really is. Perhaps we should call it "Relic."

Now ask anyone (well, almost anyone) who's coded Cocoa apps and they'll tell you it's lovely. Shoot, Apple's so proud of the frameworks they provide for devs, they even touted a new one, Core Animation, as one of the 10 things coming in Leopard. But we're still living a dual-existence (triple or quadruple or more, if you get technical) in that you have Cocoa apps, and you have the non-Cocoa apps. Perhaps you know about Java, which is what Limewire uses. Or X11's ability to run apps like GIMP. Both of those have their quirks. Java apps can be all over the place, and X11 doesn't integrate the UI of OSX, among other issues. Carbon is a mix of old-skool API's (implemented in good ol' C if I recall), and permeates Mac apps like Office and Photoshop, where a teardown/rebuild would be too unwieldy. There's also the fact that key apps like Finder and QuickTime are Carbon enough to still have some legacy code from way back when, which might account for some of their quirks too... No holy wars about Cocoa vs. Carbon, OK? I'm with David Weiss on this one. So you have Cocoa, Carbon and everything else.

Getting granular for a moment, look at a tale of two browsers: Safari vs. Firefox. Safari is a Cocoa app, and it is tightly integrated with OS X tools. It maintains the ability to look up words in the Dictionary app with a right-click, and access the OS X Keychain. Firefox is not a (full) Cocoa app, and you can't niftily use a keyboard shortcut to look up a word, nor will it store passwords in Keychain. I've learned to use this "wall" to my advantage. Since the passwords are stored differently, I can automatically log in to systems (like gmail) using two accounts simultaneously. I use my business gmail on one browser, and personal on the other. Unfortunately, you're limited to 3, as all Firefox-based browsers will share their version of Keychain, and all Webkit-derived browsers use Keychain. I say three, because Opera stands alone (and doesn't always play nice with Gmail). There's the conundrum: to the average user, they don't care, but when little non-Cocoa quirks appear, they scratch their heads and wonder why the Mac doesn't just "do stuff" one standard way.

Keep reading for my take on shareware, freeware, and malware in OS X...

plasq, developers of the hit Comic Life, have released a package of 10 screensavers for your Mac. They are funky, they are fun, and best of all they are free.

Now, I know what you're thinking, 'who cares about screensavers?' This is a matter or personal taste, but I would venture that these are some of the best looking OS X screensavers out there (especially A shining).

The sqreensavers (see what they did there?) require OS X 10.4.