Sketch 3.7 released | Hacker News Reader

Sketch 3.7 released

blog.sketchapp.com

181 pointsnathankot103 comments

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/704447216191078400 https://twitter.com/sboak/status/676568026020372481 https://twitter.com/sboak/status/664540876606017536 https://twitter.com/sboak/status/651897512538693632

> "it continues to be plagued by bugs and crashes in even mundane daily use"

Me and 5 of my friends who are also web/mobile designers moved to Sketch two years ago, during this two years I maybe had 2 or 3 crashes, and none of them affected my workflow because of the autosave feature of Sketch.

The videos he shows are examples of sketch's many micro usability problems (not so much crashes as frustrating glitches). I love Sketch, but it does have a lot of little issues.

I've been using Sketch on and off for about that long as well, and have probably only had that many crashes too. Non-crashing bugs, however, still abound: Even after installing the update just this evening, I ran into a new undo bug where an undo would jump back about ten or so actions, while redo would step through them one by one. And this is to say nothing of the perennial issues with object alignment, the inexplicable inability to move an object along an axis with the shift key, something I slogged through again this evening.

That said, most of these things can be worked around, and the benefits of Sketch are enough that a lot of designers can overlook them. Personally, though, I'm probably going to switch full-time to Affinity Designer once symbol support is released.

Agree, if it's not the pinwheel as mentioned, it's a roulette wheel that randomly chooses some point in your history to revert to. It absolutely boggles the mind that they don't acknowledge this. I specifically read these comments hoping someone else would confirm the undo issues to get their attention.

I actually own Designer (and Photo) but purchased Sketch to better integrate with some of our UX team workflows. Designer is stunning, rock solid, and I've never had a single crash or undo issue (or font rendering/scaling, or grouping, or or). Sadly no one I know uses it; it's all Sketch these days except for the Illustrator holdouts. I've asked a few of the prototyping tool folks like Framer to import the Designer file format like they do Sketch. I believe it's documented and would help encourage adoption...no news yet.

He's also using Windows. I find Sketch pretty stable on OSX

I was certain Sketch wasn't available on Windows.

Sketch is only available on OSx as far as I know

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.

I sometimes hide under my desk after hitting command+z. That pinwheel of death is just unacceptable at the rate in which I see it while performing such a critical and rudimentary action.

I still couldn't imagine going back to Photoshop, and I found XD unimpressive. As you say, about a year or so will tell.

Off topic: I can't see Adobe XD without seeing the emoticon

This :) I haven't ever heard of Adobe XD, so parsing that sentence about it's introduction was difficult

Hi @tcfunk, feel free to give it a try here: http://adobe.ly/xd It's our first public preview (beta 1), so a lot of features are still being developed. Now that the solid foundation is there, you can expect more and more features with our monthly releases. There is a new release now in April. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. @demianborba

Thanks for the hint to XD, just downloading.

Will there also be a Windows version?

Ok, after a really long download and another sign-in into Adobe Cloud a very light app opens with perhaps a fraction of Sketch's features. But maybe I am just used to sketch.

Don't think they have any chance against Sketch on OSX, maybe on Windows.

It's a first beta (in the original sense, not the Google one), and it shows. It seen to be a "simple" layout app too, not a total package like Sketch can be. I think we will see a thorough integration with the other app of the Creative Cloud.

From what I understand Adobe XD is meant to work in tandem with Photoshop and Illustrator. If you don't use those two program, XD on its own is almost entirely useless (as it stand). I believe they're working to add more features directly into XD. But when I went to check it out a few weeks ago you couldn't even choose a color by hex value. Then I closed it and never opened it again since.

Sorry to hear that is your impression @nkrisc. You probably tested our Beta 1 (Public Preview) released in March, that is our first beta, so there is a lot to be done. We have a new preview (Public Preview 2) going out in April with a lot more features. And yes, you can expect a tight integration with Photoshop or Illustrator, it's just a matter of copying and pasting items from them to XD. You can even bring content from Sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyoFGyENt3g Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and please expect a lot more features landing in our monthly releases. This is just the beginning :)

Actually, you can choose a color by hex value... it's just hidden because it's the Mac native color picker. (We're in the process of writing our own now, so it won't be this obnoxious in the future.) Second tab, select RGB in the drop-down.

Definitely give XD a whirl in the upcoming months, though, and please please do log what you need in adobexd.uservoice.com. We can't read minds, and we really do want to listen to what the you all need and provide an app that will meet them.

I will definitely do so and will check it out in the near future. However at the time I couldn't experiment with it in my normal workflow as I don't use Illustrator or Photoshop, so the then-missing features were a non-starter for me.

Hi @greenspot, oh yeah! We have a team dedicated to a Windows version to land later in the year. Performance is treated as a main feature of Adobe XD, that's why we picked the multi-platform approach, instead of cross-platform. Both Mac and Windows versions are first class citizens, taking the best of each OS. @demianborba

Have a look at AA in Adobe XD first https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/712327571116056576.

that 'correct' one looks the worst.

If you are on hidpi display, zoom to 50%. Also, please don't call it the worst before looking at this version https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/717282519356424193.

Fwiw, since we're comparing Sketch with Adobe products, I frequently have very similar undo issues in Photoshop. Parts of the canvas get "stuck" and won't undo. I have not found a way to recover from this - it seems like the history gets permanently corrupted.

I know Sketch has frustrating bugs, but I honestly don't think they are any worse or more common than bugs in the Adobe products I use. And Adobe has had much more time and resources to fix these issues.

Maybe people are less forgiving of Sketch because it feels like a more lightweight, less complicated product, so you expect it to be bug free?

Wow, that's just a copy of sketch

To be fair Sketch is just a copy of Fireworks

To be fair, Adobe EOL'd Fireworks.

I never really understood fireworks tbh.

*sidenote: Kinda surprised, but not really, that the XD promo video requires Flash. I thought they went full-on HTML video.

http://imgur.com/NldV0a0

Hi @emehrkay, you can find more XD videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxXvBQcZAnOc... @demianborba

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.

Latest Adobe CC apps have a plugin for browsing a media library that will (on Macs,many Way) eat up CPU like crab legs at a casino buffet. Google "CEPHtmlEngine" and the app you're using and you'll likely find the location so you can rename it, deactivating it.

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

As buggy as it is (I agree it's got some issues, though I rarely have crashes), it's still far less frustrating than Fireworks was.....

Most of those tweets are from a few months ago. I've had similar things happen to me as well. In the last couple of months, I haven't come across any bugs, so I'm pretty sure they are putting more effort into making Sketch more stable.

As a rule of thumb, wait 2 or 3 weeks before upgrading to any major update(I know lots of Sketch users do the same). Usually, in 3.x.1 updates they seem to weed out a lot of bugs.

I've been slowly moving all my work over to Sketch in the last year, and now about 90% of it is all done in Sketch!

Sketch 3.7 update actually broke file loading, after update I couldn't open my previously working sketch file. To their credit though they've replied and issued an update in 30 minutes after I've sent them support request.

I've been using Sketch for a year and a half and I don't encounter too many bugs or crashes that would affect my workflow. It was buggier maybe a year ago but now I find it ok. Fireworks was a lot worse. I had to run a separate utility app that would autosave the Fireworks document every 5 minutes.

I used the latest version of Illustrator recently to create a HTML theme from a design and I'm amazed at how little has changed - no exporting 1x/2x images without a script, no exporting of layers, editing a slice requires going to Object > Slice > Options in the drop down menus.

Adobe XD looks like a rip-off of Sketch. We should support the small guy because we might be that small guy one day.

Just as a counter-point, I use sketch daily (and on 3 separate devices), I love it - never hit any bugs at all.

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/

Good to meet a fellow Antetype user!

All my colleagues use Sketch (I work at a service design agency and we do a lot of UX as well) so I've used it occasionally for compatibility. What I primarily miss in Antetype is artboards.

The auto layout feature in Antetype is more or less unique in design tools as far as I know, apart from the ones that produce actual html, and they suffer from their own problems.

The symbol handling has so far been superior in Antetype as well. It'll be interesting to try out the stuff that they've introduced in Sketch.

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

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.

I'm so happy to hear from other Antetype users, I've been using it from day one (I'm even featured on their homepage!). Are you in the bay area?

Thanks for the suggestion. I've never heard of Antetype before, and I spend a lot of time trying out tools for UI design.

The reason I've been a Sketch user for all this time is that it was the closest thing to a UI design rather than photo manipulation / drawing app I could find.

Looking forward to seeing how Antetype holds up.

Interesting -- does Antetype exports valid html? Could be a pretty nice tool to prototype and make static websites...

Hope you don't mind if I piggyback on your comment to mention the UI design tool I created called https://www.ux-app.com

Hope it's of some use to others.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

>and it's just very slow and buggy.

I've been using it for months with large-ish sheets (e.g. 10-20MB) but have neither seen it to be slow nor buggy.

I work with a number of M&A analysts who all use Excel on Mac (heresy!) for financial modeling every day. With a combination of BetterTouchTools to access deep menu items and script sequences of key commands, as well as an intuitive knowledge of the builtin keyboard shortcuts, they see no reason to go back to Windows. Also, Excel has Applescript AND VB/XLM macros nowadays, and if you bind those to BetterTouchTools, you can do absolutely anything you want. If you haven't tried the Office 365 version, it's worth taking another look.

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...).

Have you seen PaintCode?

Or the paintcode plugin for sketch?

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.

Look at the contents of a .SVG file.

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).

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.

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.

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/

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.

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).

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 :)

Have you tried Invision?

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...

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.

Is there any way to link any of that top stuff back to the company's main site? They start linking at the end of the article ... I wonder how many page visitor decided TL;DR!

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".

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.

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.

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...)

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

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.

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

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

I'm currently trying to learn sketch and I'm starting with this youtube playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLnpHn493BHE6UIsdKYlS...

Thanks, will check this out.

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

Are you coming from another product, or learning design from scratch?

I'm interested in the "design from scratch" answer if you don't mind ;)

I'm most comfortable in Photoshop and each time I fire up Sketch I find myself moving back to Photoshop. I know this is bad and want to get better at Sketch as I understand it's a more suitable tool for the job (vector-based, etc.).

I do the same thing. It usually takes me about an hour or before I hit a bug or, more rarely, a crash. Then it's back to Photoshop. I've repeated this cycle about once a quarter for a couple years now.

What do you miss the most in Photoshop?

A few people have recommended these to me, but I haven't gotten around to checking them out myself: https://designcode.io

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCayG894faBz8UIKFH6uOMvA

I started by reading the documentation: https://www.sketchapp.com/learn/documentation/

After that I dove into a design project and learned further by doing and researching when I needed something I couldn't figure out.

There are additional resources here as well: https://www.sketchapp.com/learn/

There are some good articles and tutorials at http://www.sketchappsources.com.

And a collection on Medium: https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources

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

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

Inkscape is the premier Linux vector application (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...

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)

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.

No signs of a windows version yet :(

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

the fact that its a new product and doesn't come with the legacy of their heavyweights might be refreshing from Adobe. The main issue i have with Photoshop and Illustrator is how bloated they became over the years trying to cater for every possible niche.

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

They explicitly answer this question in the FAQ (sketchapp.com/support/faq):

Is Sketch available for Windows or Linux?

Due to the technologies and frameworks exclusive to OS X that Sketch has been built upon, regrettably we are not considering supporting Sketch on either of these platforms.

I may still be sad about it though

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

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

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

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.

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