Hacker News Reader

Comment by vladdanilov | Hacker News Reader

> Omvlee decided to design his application to run natively on OS X. This was very smart. Although Omvlee could have reached a considerably wider audience by designing Sketch for Windows (or OS X and Windows), focusing on the Mac market was highly strategic

Sketch exists thanks to the genius of Quartz / Core Graphics. It does not have a rendering engine per se and struggles even with path ops [1].

This technical debt may soon be the end of Sketch. Because apart from Adobe, there is now Figma with smart people like Evan Wallace who can really "decide" [2][3].

With C++ core, Figma can go fully native [4], and it's puzzling why they have done this already.

[1] https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/892358827378696194

[2] https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...

[3] https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering...

[4] https://twitter.com/evanwallace/status/673959396104273921

View on HN

> focusing on the Mac market was highly strategic

I think it was simply because of developer convenience: https://www.sketchapp.com/support/requirements/other-platfor...

on the long term this looks like a major mistake.

"on the long term this looks like a major mistake."

Thank God you didn't make a mistake like this, where you build a company around a profitable product making millions of dollars, but might one day feel bad because there are other customers who can't buy your product, who likely wouldn't buy your product anyways!

I leave that game to Figma :)

I do work on a design product and my first target platform is the browser. Cheers ;)

Heh, so maybe I was overly sarcastic in my tone, assuming you were just criticizing from the sidelines. :)

I suppose the less sarcastic version, is that Sketch is just a happy accident. A class project, that turned out to be very close to something solving a real problem for a significant market of people willing to pay money for a solution to that problem.

I'm not sure, I've worked with maybe 30 or so designers in my time and they have only been barely less cross platform than Sketch.*

* Anecdote, YMMV

There is also Affinity Designer.

Sketch became a good enough default very quickly, but there are starting to be several competitors that are just as good if not way better.

Affinity Designer is an excellent tool for illustration and graphic design, and it can work as a UI design tool as well (better at least than Illustrator or Photoshop), but nothing else (outside of browser-based tools) has quite leaned into the UI design niche like Sketch has.

Sketch turned an important corner when it introduced two things: Symbol overrides and scaling constraints. These two things made UI design in Sketch a massively more streamlined process than any other product, and while other packages have started to adopt them, Sketch has stayed ahead by further developing these features along with shared library support and a robust plugin API enabling further workflow-enhancing tools like Sketch Runner.

Sketch is, however, fairly terrible as a general-purpose vector editor. Its clumsy shape tools are bad enough that I usually start any icon design in Affinity Designer and then import to Sketch.

Affinity Designer is also does not have the psuedo subscription style that Sketch uses.

They also allow you to install it in as many machines as you like. Sketch forces you to buy a license for each of your computers.

I'm glad you mentioned this. There are many reasons why I'm no longer using Sketch, but their weird pricing model is the reason I finally decided enough was enough.

And Affinity Designer is incredible on the iPad/iPad Pro as well. Amazing vector and raster tools and its pretty much a straight port of the desktop version.

Affinity is great on Windows too, and with a reasonably good price point.

Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro, Graphic, Sketch. I purchased them all, trying to find which I prefer. All excellent actually.

I just don't want to subscribe to software.

Affinity Designer isn‘t really comparable, it‘s more a general vector tool for artist and creating from scratch, not a design/prototyping environment for designers with a rich ecosystem and integrations.

I like Affinity Designer a lot and use it for my design work. Adobe lost me the day they went to a subscription model.

Sketch now runs on Metal—since version 52—and it has greatly improved performance. Your references seems to be very outdated.

Looks like this landed in October 2018: https://blog.sketchapp.com/dark-mode-data-a-brand-new-look-a... There are indeed significant performance improvements.

"Now running on Metal and with a brand new tiling system for the Canvas, Sketch performs better than ever when moving, resizing and manipulating layers in a large or complex document — up to 2.7x faster than Sketch 51!"

Are these "struggles with path ops" simply exposing latent bugs in Quartz or the GPU?

I’m guessing they haven’t because lots of designers love the Figma web app and it beats even the fully native experience Sketch bet on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com