Red Pen lets you draw stuff on images really fast

Originally downloaded 7/4/06. I just ran across this little freebie.  As the author says, it’s a “a stupidly simple os x application for scribbling on images.”  It can only scribble in red ink, too.  But in the family of apps that let you draw on the screen, it could prove very handy if all you want to do is mark up some screenshots.  In that case, just take your screenshot (set it to save to the clipboard), open red pen and hit New.  The screenshot opens, and you can write or draw whatever and then save it back.  It doesn’t pretend to be in the same league as FlySketch, but it might be just as useful for certain kinds of tasks.

Update 9/2/06. I’ve evaluated all of the desktop-annotation tools I’m aware of and one of these days will post the results on Mars. In the meantime, suffice it to say that Red Pen was too bare-bones for my needs. The kindest thing I can say about Red Pen is that it does what it says it will do, but that’s not very much. The author has a lot of cool freeware like this on his site, but clearly Red Pen was more of a learning exercise than a usable tool. Besides, he’s probably spending most of his time and energy on the powerful-looking Pixen freeware project, which looks pretty darn sweet.

Version as tested: 1.0