FlickScreen and Collecting for Creativity
People who rely on their creative juices to make a living have always ‘collected’ inspirational items. Images, textures, toys, etc. get stored in the ‘bank’ for later use.
In the past I’ve made several unsuccessful attempts to keep track of website designs that I like. But simple bookmarking has never really worked for me. I rarely make the effort to go back and organize the bookmarks so I always end up with one giant list. Saving a URL doesn’t really take a ‘snapshot’ of the inspirational design, sites get redesigned, URLs change, etc. So my already unmanageable list can eventually be filled with designs different than those that originally inspired me or invalid URLs. There’s got to be a better way.
Matthew Smith, author of the recent Digital Web Magazine article about collecting for design was having similar problems with screen captures. So he approached a Cocoa-programming friend of his who came up with FlickScreen. FlickScreen allows for convenient uploading of screen captures directly to your Flickr account.
FlickScreen runs in your Apple menu bar. A dropdown allows you to choose between uploading a capture of your entire screen or just a specific portion of it. Users can easily enter titles, descriptions, and keywords for their captures and even put them in specific sets. It takes about 10 seconds to classify and upload a capture. All without leaving the page.
