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Bugshot Relaunches as Pinpoint

I was a fan of Marco Arment’s Bugshot when it launched in 2013. As someone who takes screenshots for app reviews on a daily basis, any tool that can help me annotate and edit those screenshots quickly is welcome. Evernote hasn’t been paying much attention to Skitch over the past couple of years, and even after they introduced iOS 8 support two months ago, they did so with unstable extensions that I still can’t use reliably.

This is why I’m thrilled to see that Bugshot has been relaunched as Pinpoint by Lickability, makers of longtime MacStories favorite Quotebook.

Pinpoint builds on the design and feature set of Bugshot and it adds new editing tools and initial iOS 8 integration. The app launches to a grid of recent screenshots from your device; tap one to start annotating it, choosing from four tools at the top. Pinpoint can add arrows, rectangular selections, blur sensitive information, and also add text on top of screenshots. Every tool is easy to use and requires minimal interaction: even when you want to add text, you just need to tap the image, type your note, and tap the screen again to dismiss the keyboard. This simplicity could never be found in Skitch, which makes Pinpoint the fastest way to have a decent set of annotations for iOS screenshots.

For iOS 8, Lickability has added support for deleting the original screenshot from your library when you’re done editing. There’s two ways to do this: you can hit the share button when you’re done annotating and tap Delete Original, or you can enable a setting to always delete originals after sharing. This is useful for all those times when you want to take a screenshot just to share an annotation with someone else and don’t particularly care about keeping the original on your device.

With Pinpoint, Lickability has moved to a freemium model: the app is free to try, and you can unlock a $4.99 In-App Purchase to enable more colors. It’ll be interesting to see if more editing tools will be added as extra paid features down the road.

With the new editing tools and iOS 8 photo library integration, I’m already planning to replace Skitch with Pinpoint. Easy screenshot annotations require a frictionless editing experience, and Pinpoint enables that. I’d like to see an action extension to annotate and share images from anywhere, but Pinpoint already marks a great comeback as it is.

Pinpoint is available for free on the App Store.

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