
Sketch 3.7 released - nathankot
https://blog.sketchapp.com/sketch-3-7-and-new-symbols-d833a5be4027#.q5rmmbk2j
======
sboak
I've been using Sketch for over a year now, and though it's been a valuable
tool (and the integration with Framer is wonderful) it continues to be plagued
by bugs and crashes in even mundane daily use. They proudly announce new
features while ignoring the toll these issues take on the designers who depend
on their software. I'm posting this in the hope that they'll acknowledge and
address some of these issues quickly.

Here are screen grabs of just a few of the most obvious bugs I've encountered
recently:
[https://twitter.com/sboak/status/651518759690108928](https://twitter.com/sboak/status/651518759690108928)
[https://twitter.com/sboak/status/704447216191078400](https://twitter.com/sboak/status/704447216191078400)
[https://twitter.com/sboak/status/676568026020372481](https://twitter.com/sboak/status/676568026020372481)
[https://twitter.com/sboak/status/664540876606017536](https://twitter.com/sboak/status/664540876606017536)
[https://twitter.com/sboak/status/651897512538693632](https://twitter.com/sboak/status/651897512538693632)

~~~
jaysonelliot
Hear, hear. And with the introduction of Adobe XD, Sketch has a rapidly
closing window to eliminate the worst bugs.

In the last release, I was plagued by one where undo didn't work. Not only did
it not work, it randomly shifted layers around the artboard or introduced
other glitches into my work. I can't think of many actions that are more
automatic than hitting undo — when that essential safety net becomes
destructive, it's devastating.

Hopefully 3.7 introduces much-needed stability. At the moment, Adobe XD is
still new enough that it won't cause a mass exodus. No layers, for example.
But a year from now, either Sketch will have worked incredibly hard to retain
the users who stayed because there was no alternative, or XD will have matured
and eaten their lunch.

~~~
ryanSrich
Eh...Not really. Have you ever opened an Adobe application up on your machine?
The next time you do be sure to fire up Activity Monitor and see your CPU
light up. I wouldn't touch another Adobe app with a 10ft pole so long as it
requires any interaction with CC, and I know many designers in the same boat.

~~~
demianborba
Sorry to hear that @ryanSrich. We built Adobe XD from the ground up, with a
brand new (and fast) rendering engine. You can have hundreds of artboards with
no issues whatsoever. Let us know what you think if you have a chance. Thanks,
@demianborba

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webwielder2
Feeble reminder that Sketch is yet another graphics/drawing app pressed into
UI design service rather than being specially built for that purpose. I use
Antetype for high fidelity mockups:
[http://antetype.com/](http://antetype.com/)

~~~
mortenjorck
Wow, surprised I've never heard of Antetype. The auto-layout looks intriguing:
is it based around the box model?

~~~
luckydata
I'm an Antetype user from day one, it came out before flexbox (I assume that's
what you mean) but behaves in a very similar way except for a couple small
minor details.

------
howlingfantods
It's a joy to see so many newer, lighter weight but fully featured OSX apps
replace the bloated Adobe software suite (eg. sketch, affinity photo, etc.)

Now will someone please, please make a fully featured spreadsheet alternative
to Excel on Mac? All I want is to be able to use the alt key ribbon
shortcuts...

~~~
johns
Isn't that what Numbers is? And it's terrible if you know Excel. Plus Office
is only like $10 a month now.

Edit: Meant Numbers, said Sheets.

~~~
howlingfantods
Sheets is definitely usable but it's a bit light on functionality. I'm using
the new Excel for Mac right now and it's just very slow and buggy. Also, the
aforementioned alt-key shortcut is absent in the Mac version. Not having these
shortcuts literally adds hours to my workday.

I'd probably pay 300-400 dollars for an Excel alternative with full keyboard
shortcuts.

~~~
nodesocket
And you've tried Mac Numbers
([http://www.apple.com/mac/numbers/](http://www.apple.com/mac/numbers/))
right?

~~~
howlingfantods
I tried it many years ago and it was lacking features like pivot tables and
scripting. Overall, I got the impression that numbers was more consumer than
professional oriented. Haven't used it recently though.

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seanmcdirmid
A simple prototype system via symbols. Nice, but still not as simple as they
claim. I wonder how long until these tool companies actually consider more
programming power; e.g. as in Bret Victor's Drawing Dynamic Visualizations
([http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddend...](http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddendum/)).

~~~
archagon
It would be amazing to have a vector graphics editor that has an underlying
editable code representation. One of the major pain points of graphics
software today is the assumption that your work is destructive; Illustrator
(and probably others) allow you to make non-destructive edits using Pathfinder
and such, but it quickly becomes a massive pain once you're more than a few
layers deep. I'd love to be able to define complex relationships between
shapes and attributes in code and then jump back to WYSIWYG mode to work out
the details. It's quite a complex problem to put both modes on equal footing,
however.

~~~
Animats
Look at the contents of a .SVG file.

~~~
archagon
I think Gimp might actually allow you to make live SVG edits, but I don't
think you can have variables or loops in SVG. You'd need a scripting language
plus a higher-level interface along the lines of Core Graphics (UIBezierPath).

~~~
Animats
My point is that you can work on .SVG from a program; it's a simple text
format. It's declarative, not executable. You don't want to have a Turing-
complete executable graphics representation; it's too hard to edit. Postscript
and PDF are executable representations, and editing either does not work well.

Also, if it's executable, someone will write an exploit in it.

~~~
archagon
Fine, but what if I need to do something like: create a shape, make 5
instances of it (all progressively offset, translated, and rotated), and give
each one a different color and outline — all while still keeping the original
shape editable? What if I have a polygon with a child polygon that needs to
have the same angle on one of its sides as its parent? What if I want to give
the shadows in different parts of my file the same opacity and color? What if
I want to define the relationship between an object's width and the thickness
of its borders? I run into these sort of problems all the time. Illustrator
almost gets there with its non-destructive effects, but it's not enough. Doing
it using code alone is awful, since these sorts of problems tend to be small
(but essential) parts of a project, and I need the GUI for the rest.

A lot of vector art already runs as a program; it just happens to run in the
artist's head, and requires far too much effort to update. There ought to be a
general solution.

~~~
matt4077
That's kinda how SVG works if I remember correctly. You can define templates
that cab ber instantiated multiple times, with optional transformations.

It's just not easy to do. If you want easy, you should take a look at
[http://framerjs.com/](http://framerjs.com/)

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mortenjorck
Of all the weird usability quirks Sketch has held onto over the past few
years, the automatic propagation of changes from one instance of an applied
text or object style to all other instances was probably the most maddening.
So it's great to see that finally resolved in 3.7 with manual style sync.

Next on my Sketch usability wish list: the ability to set the fill or stroke
on a group instead of having to go in and manually select each of its objects.

~~~
waffl
Yes, this issue alone was a complete blocker in my opinion, thank goodness
it's been resolved. 100+ page documents could be destroyed in one simple
action of pasting a styled text into a box with a pre-existing style assigned.
(It was irreversible via an undo).

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kriro
I recently bought a Wacom Bamboo Spark (basically lets you take notes on
regular paper and digitizes that). I only used it for note taking so far. Does
anyone use a similar device for prototyping apps (with Sketch but I'll take
other suggestions). Should work fine in theory as it can export to image
formats, right?

Usecase I'm dreaming of: Have a piece of paper with the exact dimensions of my
target device, scribble down a layout, have it digitized via the Spark and
then get it on the device and make stuff clickable and link pages. Very basic
setup for a click prototype. Looking for a decent setup for this...I've played
around with "upload page=image, make areas clickable and link pages" before
and it was rather painful.

All suggestions welcome. I can scribble down stuff on paper acceptably well.
Actually showing it to people on device and have simple clickflow interactions
would be pretty valuable. Especially if it's quick and can be done onsite :)

~~~
greatjones
Have you tried Invision?

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bovermyer
Is it just me, or are more and more companies starting to use Medium via a
subdomain on their site as their official blog?

There's nothing inherently wrong with Sketch's (and others') approach, I just
think it's a little odd to choose something unbrandable for a company blog...

~~~
Mtinie
In many cases it probably is a better business decision than standing up and
maintaining a branded blog that only gets updated once or twice a month, tops.

Medium's content editor is nice and simple to use, too.

If it's a busines priority to generate a lot of quality content, I agree with
you, a branded offering is probably better, if only for the ability to keep
control of the content.

------
pixard
I really dislike how fonts render in Sketch. There used to be a option to sub-
pixel anti-alias fonts but they removed it for "performance reasons, and
improved consistency with mobile platforms".

~~~
rjkaplan
Out of curiosity, what platform do you design for? I often make designs for
web and mobile web, and I want my text to look the same in my design tool as
it does on the platform I'm designing for. Since mobile devices don't support
sub-pixel antialiasing, I don't want it enabled in my design tool either.

~~~
pixard
I do design for websites and web applications. Mobile is a consideration of
course but mostly desktop oriented.

I understand not everyone wants it but that was the beauty of having it as an
__option __. Now it 's just gone and those of us who do want it can't use it.
Personally I never had a performance problem with it (plus it was off by
default) so I was (and still am) very annoyed at it being removed.

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markbao
Having overrides for text and images in the inspector is amazing. And what
they're doing with automatically shifting nearby elements to text is an
awesome touch ([https://cdn-
images-2.medium.com/max/1600/1*nXORHhDfi1ZiscIUi...](https://cdn-
images-2.medium.com/max/1600/1*nXORHhDfi1ZiscIUiU9M4A.gif))

I wonder if future versions will have auto-sizing for symbols so that buttons
can expand in size dynamically.

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asadlionpk
I finally gave up on Flash 5[1] and started using Sketch. I am a front-end
developer and needed a lightweight tool for occasional design tweaks or side-
projects.

[1] Yes I know it's not the primary use-case of Flash, but it was a great tool
and had almost all the features Sketch has.

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easytiger
Does anyone have any idea of how many customers sketch has? Or even similar
products like balsamiq?

------
littleweep
Can anyone recommend any solid resources for learning to use Sketch?

~~~
makenova
I'm currently trying to learn sketch and I'm starting with this youtube
playlist
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLnpHn493BHE6UIsdKYlS...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLnpHn493BHE6UIsdKYlS5zu-
ZYvx22CS)

~~~
asadlionpk
This playlist is what I used to learn Sketch too, quite good.

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lisodeic
3.7 release has definitely slowed everything to a crawl for me. Organizing
Icons is totally impractical and my workflow is all messed up.

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DrRobinson
Sketch is really nice from what I've seen from it. Does anyone know if there
is anything like it which is Linux compatible?

~~~
fractallyte
Inkscape is the premier Linux vector application
([https://inkscape.org/en/](https://inkscape.org/en/)).

I prefer Creature House Expression running in WINE on Linux/Mac. It's old, but
awesome; at the time, it was a serious competitor to Illustrator. Brilliant
interface, innovative drawing features, great manual. Free download:
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=312...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=31249)

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wiradikusuma
Correct me if I'm wrong: Sketch to mobile app is just what Photoshop did
(does?) to Web design right? I mean, last time we used to draw websites in
Photoshop, "slice" it and slap into HTML. We stop doing that because (I think)
people just prefer to code html directly. What is the utility of Sketch then?
Can't you just use UI designer from XCode/Android Studio? (Note: I'm talking
from Android dev perspective)

~~~
st3v3r
It's a dedicated tool for designing layout. You're not going to do the same
thing you used to do with photoshop and websites.

Not to mention that, at least on the Android side, their UI designer is
absolutely atrocious. Like, to the point where a company like Google should be
utterly mortified that they let something out that was that bad, and the
developers of it probably should commit seppuku in order to preserve the honor
of their families.

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kyriakos
No signs of a windows version yet :(

~~~
ryan-allen
Adobe are moving in to the space with a new product, I have a feeling it might
be a hit.

~~~
rimantas
Fireworks (originaly from Macromedia) was this kind of product.

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iamcreasy
Can anyone suggest an equivalent tool for Android that you've used in
production?

~~~
fractallyte
Android is a mobile operating system. Even if an equivalent graphics app
exists (unlikely), it will rarely (if _ever_ ) be used in serious
production...

~~~
iamcreasy
But in the Sketch's product video they connect the desktop app with an iPhone
and show live update. Here is the Sketch's video
[https://youtu.be/YdIeiCyKwpI?t=33s](https://youtu.be/YdIeiCyKwpI?t=33s)

Why there won't be anything like that for Android devices?

Update : I misunderstood the purpose of the software. I was only asking
Sketch's iOS mirroring feature.

