Instapaper creator Marco Arment launches Bugshot, a Skitch rival for highlighting visual bugs in iOS apps

Marco Arment, best known as the creator of Instapaper, has today launched a new iOS app called Bugshot.

Aimed at developers, beta testers and pedants alike, the app allows you to mark up screenshots of iOS apps with arrows and boxes in order to quickly highlight typos, design flaws and other visual issues. These annotated screenshots can then be saved the Camera Roll, sent via email and Messages, shared via Twitter and Facebook, and the like. Essentially, it’s a lightweight rival to Evernote’s Skitch.

As Arment explains in his announcement for the app,

“Whenever I see a bug in an app (usually one of mine), I take a screenshot, intending to deal with it later. But often, when I look back, I can’t remember why I took a particular screenshot.

“Bugshot’s sole purpose is dealing with those screenshots better: being a home for them, making it easier to find them (rather than browsing your entire Camera Roll, interspersed with photos), and making it fast and easy to draw big orange annotations on them so it’s clear what needs attention.”

The timing of the app’s release is ideal for the many developers who will be reworking their apps to suit the new aesthetic of iOS 7. Ironically, there’s a visual bug in version 1.0 of Bugshot – a grid that is added to screenshots put through the app doesn’t fill the screen when in landscape mode. No need to send Arment any Bugshot-ified screenshots of his own app though, he’s on it and says that it’s fixed in the next version.

Bugshot is Arment’s first app release after a trio of exits in quick succession this year. He sold Instapaper to Betaworks in April, then in May he sold his ‘The Magazine’ publication to its own editor and received a payout from Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr, which he launched with David Karp in 2007.

➤ Bugshot for iOS 

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