

Discovering Sketch - xm
https://medium.com/design-ux/25545f6cb161

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shmageggy
This looks _very_ much like Fireworks. The author mentioned that he won't
discuss it since Adobe discontinued it, but the resemblance is uncanny. I
never understood why Fireworks wasn't more widely used/praised; I found it to
be absolutely perfect for designing web graphics.

~~~
falk
I love Sketch, but I don't like Fireworks. I find Fireworks awkward and
clunky.

~~~
gcb0
yeah, the UI is not sexy. But the feature set that is being boasted in the
article is THE SAME from firewoks around 1999.

It was the only place i could get some vector work and still be pixel perfect.

Last used photoshop in 2006 and it wasn't even close.

...sadly gimp tries too hard to be a photoshop clone even copying the lame
export dialog instead of save as...

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gfodor
Sketch has much better support for layer and stroke styles than Fireworks did,
particularly older versions of Fireworks. For example, you can apply multiple
gradient layer styles to both the stroke and the fill of a rectangle in
Sketch, with alpha. In Fireworks, you often had to make two or three
rectangles to get the appropriate effect of a photorealistic button.

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jongold
Nice post - Sketch is revolutionising UI design workflow. Really well thought
out product — we've standardised on it for all our products at work, and I
haven't even installed and Adobe products on my newest laptop, 8 months in.

I'll admit that I was initially frustrated at the constant crashes etc, but
there's a very responsive team, constant releases, and I haven't had a problem
in months.

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clumsysmurf
I've been using Inkscape on my Mac for quite a while, but the team doesn't
seem to be willing or able to support the platform well. The download page
still has 0.48.2 which is pretty ancient; I'm not too optimistic 0.49 will see
good mac support either.

I like inkscape, and if I migrate to Windows / Linux I can continue to use my
assets there.

But this app looks very nice; I wonder if anyone can briefly mention the areas
where one app is stronger than the other.

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Goondaba
Have you tried using the Fink installation? It seems to have a more recent
build, 0.48.4-5.

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markbao
My design workflow has moved from Illustrator for design structure and
Photoshop for high-fidelity design, to strictly Sketch from conception all the
way to exporting assets, with the rare Photoshop for some assets (like to-the-
pixel ones).

It's totally changed my design process, and it's made me wonder why there
wasn't a really good app that was built from the ground up for UI design
before—and why we have been 'hacking' Illustrator and Photoshop to do UI
design. Vector objects on a pixel grid, @2x exporting, non-destructive
properties on items. Still buggy as hell, but despite having to restart it
multiple times a day, it's still worth it.

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omegote
It would have been great to point out at the beginning of the article that
this sketch software is for Mac only. Serious web development is not only done
in Mac, did you know?

~~~
workbench
How times change

~~~
xutopia
I remember in 2001 a friend of mine brought his black Apple laptop at work
because he wanted to work with it to do a web application in Java. Everyone
laughed at him. Now if I see someone with a thick Dell or IBM laptop it's the
exception.

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davidlumley
Sketch is absolutely amazing. I moved from Illustrator to Sketch last year, as
I was getting frustrated with cruft Adobe were adding, and things they weren't
fixing. It took a little longer for me to get used to Sketch at around 3
months of casual use, but I find it much faster, simpler, and easier to use
than Illustrator.

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rbritton
With Adobe now forcing a subscription to their Creative Cloud service for
future updates, I'd expect programs like Sketch to become more and more
attractive as well.

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cshesse
Sketch is on it's way to being what Illustrator should be. It's still a little
buggy at times, for instance, you can't export things at high resolution and
the workaround, resizing a group of objects, rarely works correctly.

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bradgessler
Yep, there are lots of bugs, but they release fixes for them and its always
been getting better.

I've completely ditched the entire Adobe Suite for Sketch and Pixelmator.

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seivan
I went for Pixelmator instead of Sketch, but I'm with you with ditching Adobes
suit. Not necessary these days for interface design.

Pixelmator lacks the full layer styles, but it's slowly getting some of them.

Though I can appreciate what Sketch is trying to do, I feel like Pixelmators
performance and layout is better suited for me.

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HunterV
Sketch is better than anything else on the market simply because it's actually
made for user interface design. Everything else that's existed for years was
made for image processing.

Get Sketch. Seriously.

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TheBindingVoid
If with "everything" you mean Photohop, then you're right. For everyone else
there was Fireworks which initially was a promising screen design tool.

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danenania
Sketch literally gave me the push I needed to go from a non-designing
developer to a halfway decent designer. It's really that good.

The major negative right now is performance. I used Sketch to design a full
iOS app with 7 or 8 screens on a fast mbp and things were seriously crawling.
I had to break up separate screens into separate sketch files and even then it
was laggy.

Sketch team, your product is amazing, but performance is a big issue. It
should imho be your top priority.

~~~
gfodor
Agreed. Seriously picking up UI design in a post-Sketch world is basically the
same as picking up web programming in a post-J2EE world. You dodged a bullet.

(I am pretty proficient in Photoshop, but never had to design a photorealistic
mobile UI in it. What a nightmare.)

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bostonvaulter2
Is there any comparable program to use for windows or linux users?

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chestnut-tree
For Windows, take at look at Xara Photo and Graphic Designer. It's principally
a vector Illustration program but includes some photo manipulation
capabilities too (cropping images, adjusting brightness and contrast etc).

The interface is far superior to Illustrator and it's extremely fast in
performance.

I have used this program for many years and recommend you give it a try to see
if you like it.

There is a free trial version of the software on the Xara website

[http://www.xara.com/uk/photo-graphic-designer/](http://www.xara.com/uk/photo-
graphic-designer/)

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uxwtf
I discovered Sketch about a year ago, and I should say it keeps getting better
comparing to Illustrator. There are still some operations I can't do in
Sketch, but it is the fastest and the lightest app to design UI such as
[http://dribbble.com/shots/1111784-iOS-7-icons-
redesign/attac...](http://dribbble.com/shots/1111784-iOS-7-icons-
redesign/attachments/140689). It took me few hours to redesign a whole iOS7
icon set in Sketch. Last months I use Illustrator to convert files to SVG to
work on them in Sketch. The sad thing is that it works on Mac only and is not
adopted by the designer community yet.

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TheBindingVoid
Sketch looks promising. But I would expect a couple of more features from an
efficient screen design tool:

Reusable elements (FW symbols), multiple pages, something like Fireworks'
"Master page", (basic) bitmap editing.

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etherealG
is there no form of bitmap editing at all?

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jmdenis
Very basic so far, deleting pixels by double-clicking the bitmap image and use
the marquee tool + backspace.

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falk
Sometimes things don't vertically center properly when I use the "Align
Vertically" button. I haven't seen anyone else complain about this, so am I
doing something wrong?

Here's an example: [http://imgur.com/kgbMwJ2](http://imgur.com/kgbMwJ2)

Ninja edit: After looking at the screenshot I posted above again, it looks
like the entire textbox is being vertically centered (the blue outline is
centered), but not the text inside of it. Why does it a function this way and
can I change it so that it vertically centers the text? Thanks.

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joelanman
I love Sketch, it's a great Fireworks replacement. A few tips:

⌘ + cursor right or down: nudge width/height

in preferences you can set it to zoom into selection, which I prefer

when elements are grouped, hold ⌘ to select elements in the group directly

right click a layer and select mask - this will mask any layers above it. If
it's in a group it will only affect the elements in the group

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aaronmoodie
I've been using Sketch exclusively for the better part of a year, and it's not
just a better tool for designing web and mobile UIs, it's a real pleasure to
use.

There are still quite a few bugs, but even with those, the Sketch workflow
trumps Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks. Version 3 should also address
most of these, and is supposed to include support for symbols as well.

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checker659
I still use DrawIt from BohemianCoding (the same company / people) and it's
really good for smallish UI work. The CoreImage based text rendering sucks and
it leaks memory like anything but it's a nice piece of software. I hope sketch
has all of what they created in DrawIt and more. Good luck!

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_pmf_
Usable smart guides as a feature have been in the shitty freeware vector tools
I used 7 years ago. I don't quite understand why the author is wetting his
pants because of them, but maybe the Apple ecosystem has been so far behind
that this is somehow new and cool.

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lysa
I tried it a few weeks ago and after working for about 2 hours on something I
realized that Sketch doesn't have any support for color management (switching
color profiles etc.). This is a showstopper for me.

~~~
workbench
Does it need them… as a screen design tool?

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anderspetersson
Seems to me that this app could implement HTML exporting better than Photoshop
does, since it can export CSS already.

Is this implemented or on the roadmap?

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falk
I hope not. Sketch should stay lean and be easy to make plugins for. Also,
typically auto generated HTML sucks.

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danabramov
A UI designer I know has been using Sketch for months now, and he's very happy
about it.

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Stranger2013
Err... Not available for Windows -> FAIL. You should reflect this in subj to
avoid peoples' frustration.

