I wouldn't die on that hill.
My girlfriend is a UX professional that does most of her work in Sketch. She doesn't care about macOS beyond the fact that it's required by the tools she has to use.
I impulse-built an overpowered Windows machine earlier this year and tried to pawn it off on her, but she didn't even want it because it doesn't run Sketch. She's stuck on a Macbook.
Some people are replying to you saying there are these great benefits to being macOS native, but they really pale in comparison to having to learn something as complex as Sketch. A few familiar component paradigms don't really put a dent in the learning curve, or it's at least vastly overstated. I'd liken Sketch more to Photoshop in the sense that some native components aren't going to make the hard stuff easier.
One practical downside of being macOS-only is that it makes those hard fought Sketch skills less portable and any business that uses Sketch in their pipeline now has a hard platform requirement. Maybe they'll choose something else like Figma. That's something much more tangible to a Sketch professional.
Even VS Code's popularity among developers (the one group presumably sensitive to "native" vs not) suggests how little weight "native" carries with most people. When it's time to get work done, turns out there are more important considerations.
I think you're right, hard to imagine it's a hill worth dying on.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816
So I believe both platforms are problematic. Does Windows try to do way more data collection by default? Sadly yes. Is Mac without fault? Sadly no.
Same for videos from YouTube in Safari when they go full screen.
I use Windows 10 for work and Mac OS for personal use and both have their share of quirkiness and bugs. Mac OS is way more mouse based UI and interestingly no one complains about it.
In my agency Mac is there because of tradition from developers and designers. More and more developers jump ship to better hardware and use Windows with WLS2 or Linux. Designers tend to stay with the Mac even if they switch to Figma. Some years back it was PS -> Sketch. Now it is Sketch-> Figma massively for a year or so.
An overpowered Windows machine is best suited for gaming, not design work. Vector graphics tools like Sketch work fine on a MacBook. They don’t need a desktop grade CPU with tons of RAM and a powerful video card.
An overpowered machine would definitely be welcome. My point was to emphasize how a crossplatform app would let her take advantage of the opportunity (a new computer I built for one game that I'm giving away) where a native app does very little for her.
I use a Macbook myself and encountered the same thing on the new Windows machine. Every application that was Mac-only was just downside. It made me extra motivated to finished shifting my work environment to crossplat apps like VSCode. And CLI tools that worked well in WSL2.
My design team and myself will take the sanctity of a native app to create quality work any day versus a "design" free for all in the browser with everyone playing decorator.
I manage a design team and there’s no way in hell we would go back to Sketch.
To even think that having a “native” app has any bearing isn’t accurate at all. Sketch is so slow compared to Figma. You aren’t using multiplayer everyday but when you do need it, there’s nothing like it.
Knowing that they had a monopoly on creative software, they raised the prices to the point of completely locking out a significant portion of their userbase.
If they could, they would do the same to XD.
Seeing you write this, a doubt creeps that you ever used Sketch.
But if your team itself is functioning well and has respect for each others input it works well.
Agree to disagree (without calling it stupid beyond comprehension). Design is so much more than final UI. It's the whole experience, how it works and how it's distributed. And that involves a lot of stakeholders, not just one designer.
I hate that WhatsApp, Skype and other crap Electron apps that I’m forced to use because of other people can’t do simple things like propor multi language spell checking that macOS has had since day one and that every other app gets for free.
And with Apple Silicon, Im not sure that the restriction right now is architecture. Swift supports both x86 and ARM right? The problem is that the interactions are different in the desktop OS and simply recompiling or running it on desktop would not be a great experience.
My canary in the coal mine: Apple’s own SF Symbols.
intuitively, it would seem apples answer is to make mac apps behave/look like ipad/catalyst appe (e.g big sur's uo redesign)
An Electron app would still be better than a iOS version optimised for a big thumb.
But Chrome is a klackety resource hog compared to Safari.
Web versions of native apps always feel clunky in comparison and they're almost always missing features, like accessibility.
Please substantiate this claim. To me, the opposite is true.
lol
Worth noting Sketch broke spell check many versions back around the time I stopped using it.
As someone who's worked on a lot of collaborative technology, I find it weird how most of the interest in collaborative editing is confined to the web. As I understand it, Figma's internal collaborative engine is written in C++ anyway.
A primary thing Figma understood better than pretty much anyone else is how collaboration among different teams (not just design) works in product development.
Collaboration is also much more useful when you're not limited to only working with people using the same OS. Multi-platform distribution is built into web apps, but it takes a lot more effort to create good native apps on several platforms.
Also, of course, no need to install anything on the web, which is important for frictionless collaboration.
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It's no surprise that both desktop and mobile OS-s are very much not optimized for cross platform development. It's a feature (for owners of those OS-s), not a bug.
I love Sketch but it's closer to Illustrator or XD (at least, that's how I use it) than Figma. If they want to throw shade it should be at Adobe, since their interface is just better and app is faster/smaller/doesn't run six background daemons.
On a different note, I've heard multiple pitches where startups position themselves as "Figma for X" but never "Sketch for X." Figma is a platform that is building out into different markets, Sketch has much smaller applicability.
It's just not realistic at larger orgs (or IMO smaller ones too) to expect everyone to be on a Mac.
Then came Figma which solved this problem completely.
Are we just accepting that Sketch is “dead” now? Genuinely curious. I realize Figma has been doing great things, but wasn’t under the impression that Sketch is over.
That said, these were all website and mobile app design teams, and another commenter mentioned that Sketch is better for print design. Still, have to imagine that print is a shrinking part of the overall marketplace.
We had at least 4 people in the team that ran a (poorly performing, annoying) VM with OSX just for sketch.
Figma’s first-mover advantage is significant, though.
Back in the day we used to judge the viability of Apples new techon if the Adobe suite was using them. This was a big deal during the Classic to OS X switch and the PPC to Intel switch.
I'm convinced Apple sees the future of Macs as running iPad apps, Photoshop and Illustrator are already there. Just how many other classic Mac apps do you think Apple consider critical? I think I can name 8.
There are still print designers, packaging designers, exhibit designers, illustrators, the list goes on. I don’t see Sketch as dead, if anything it’s been getting a lot of cool new features over the past months.
I don’t know what the bandwagon is doing, other than that I’m aware that Figma is also popular, but clearly cloud software has been contending with native for some time, each with their own advantages, and so it’s not surprising or concerning that software vendors of both software platform types would market the advantages of their chosen platform.
They may not put it in those terms, but they do. They can tell when an app feels 'weird' or slow (be it actually slow or just higher latency). That depends a lot on the user base for the specific app in question. The more 'casual' the user base, the less it matters.
Being native also allows you to get functionality for free that other users may depend on. In OSX it translates to things like scripts, or more often, assistive devices, like screen readers.
Just going to leave this here https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
Ironically Jetbrains IDEs are Java, using Java Swing for the UI[1]! This is even less native than VS.Code where at least native widgets are used.
I guess this shows how much our impressions are formed by expectations!
Simple experimental proof: resize the window to be very small, and open a menu. The menu can't go outside the bounds of the window.
On my laptop (6 core 3,9GHz 32GB RAM and NVME) VS Code is fast and responsive, still wastes lots of RAM though. Jetbrains tools meanwhile were way more laggy on the same setup.
And I dream the day that React Native for Windows/Mac team at Microsoft manages to force a VSCode rewrite.
There is absolutely no reason not to be responsive, low on memory and as powerful as a native app.
[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...
I won’t go into why (as everyone here seems to be trying to convince everyone else, who aren’t really listening, anyway. I’m not really looking to change my viewpoint).
Figma is cool. I’m working with a designer, now, and we’ll see how it goes. Not sure I’d really say it was a direct Sketch competitor, though. I think Adobe Illustrator is Sketch’s biggest competitor, and that says a lot about Sketch.
On the Mac, I also like to use tooltips, applying the same string as voiceover.
[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/ambiamara/blob/bbb1d98... (Note, also, that these voiceover strings have been localized in French, German, and Spanish).
I think it's great that this is what they want to focus on, but it's not very convincing as a business decision in general -- it feels like doubling down on the past.
Nearly want to shoot myself every time I'm told, "Hey, I'm sending over the Sketch file" or "sigh An Illustrator again? I wish you had a mac w/ Sketch when you made these wires".
I can't blame the people who say that, but god damn just release a windows version. There's Lunacy for windows, but it's buggy as hell.
Call me old fashion, but I'm sticking to Illustrator for the time being