Hacker News Reader

> And for anyone who’s going to say “Sketch was Mac only that’s why it failed!”

Why would anyone say that? Sketch is still alive and (presumably) well. Apple themselves continue to officially release design files for Sketch with every OS release. They share more resources for Sketch than any other app, including Figma and Photoshop.

http://developer.apple.com/design/resources/

> after they depreciated Fireworks

I’ve been seeing that word used a lot in this context, so just wanted to point out (I’d appreciate if someone did the same for me) that what you mean is “deprecated” (no “i”), as depreciating is a different thing.

> Why would anyone say that? Sketch is still alive and (presumably) well

When people deep into the startup-woods say "Fail" what they really mean is "Didn't take over the world". Their perspective of "winning / failing" is a bit more black and white than the average person.

With that said, Sketch certainly didn't become more popular because the macOS requirement even for viewing the files. I remember that there was some hacks to be able to at least view them on Linux, and other things like Zepplin (or similar) made it even easier, but it was still cumbersome.

Then Figma appeared, offered more or less the same features, slightly worse performance than Sketch, but worked absolutely everywhere and was easy to open and inspect things for everyone on the team. Obviously, Figma ate a lot of the Sketch user-base, which is something I saw in multiple companies myself.

> When people deep into the startup-woods say "Fail" what they really mean is "Didn't take over the world". Their perspective of "winning / failing" is a bit more black and white than the average person.

Good point (also, “deep into the startup-woods” is a great way to put it). I suspect there’s a major overlap between those people and the ones who are obsessed with products “killing” another. The same kind of people who are hyped by any new shiny pebble as if it’s the second coming of Christ and immediately eschew everything which came before. The people who are so blind to context they shouted “zOMG Google is dead because of ChatGPT” because they were incapable of thinking for two seconds that Google has a ton of cash to survive in the long run, were already leading research in the field, and (of course) wouldn’t just fold their arms and stay still. In short, people not worth listening to.

This is 1 part hilarious and 1 part bewildering. You wrote an entire silly imaginary novel about my life based on a poorly worded (to your standards) sentence.

Sketch dominated the landscape. Now they are a small percentage of the landscape. I characterized that as a 'fail'. Sure, maybe an inexact word but what else do you call going from 60%+ of the market share down to below 20%? And btw I currently pay Sketch $120 for a personal license (so they obviously haven't failed in that sense).

And spare me the 'context' thing. Because my context on this subject is as a individual contributor, leader of multiple large design orgs with dozens of designers all in the same tools, as an early Sketch, Figma, Invision and Framer X customer. The context is up there with the Console Wars but I don't have the room for that here.

What's your context?

Have a great day!

Er, my friend, you utterly misunderstood my comment. I wasn’t thinking about you at all when I wrote that (I didn’t have any individual in mind, just an amalgamation of opinions I’ve seen shared in multiple places). Why would I? The way I understood (and replied) to your original comment, you weren’t one of the people saying Sketch had failed. I was supporting and continuing your point, not refuting it, though now I understand you were indeed agreeing with your imaginary users saying Sketch failed but disagreeing with their imaginary reasons. My bad, I misunderstood that about your argument.

But if you felt attacked, that is entirely on you. It wasn’t at all my intention, and my comment is pretty clearly a continuation of what the other user said, which in my view also didn’t attack anyone specifically. Yours was one of the strangest and most unexpected responses I got in recent memory, and it took me a bit to even understand why you were so mad and thumping your chest. Hilarious and bewildering indeed.

People say it all of the time. Go onto any other platform discussing this topic and you'll see it as the most cited reason for Figma's dominance.

Yes, Sketch's logo has been featured in a Apple keynote before. I'm familiar with their relationship with Apple and it seems like their team is perfectly happy not being the gargantuan that Figma is.

Sometimes I feel like people just want to find any reason to disagree on here.

Lastly, maybe you should just make a depreciation (sic) bot.

Of course we would say that, with the exception of my current employer, and I am approaching 50 years, no one else has used Apple gear on the office, designers working at my previous employers had to put up with Windows if they wanted a job, and I can vouch we always had plenty of candidates looking for one.

> It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering.

Writing this from the perspective of someone who used to spend all day every day in Photoshop/Sketch/Figma for decades. This markedly contradicts my recollection of the state of Sketch at the time Figma was in its first public beta. Sketch's performance was abhorrent and it was constantly crashing while working with libraries. I was very skeptical about web-technology based tool in terms of performance, but Figma blew me away. It was FAST.

There's definitely others that shared your perspective. A commonly cited reason of early Figma adopters was that they felt it was faster than Sketch.

Of course, the reality was that performance is a super nuanced thing. It's always measured in relation to specific things, but ultimately summarized via a "feeling".

Aspects of performance include:

- Loading a (blank/medium/large) file from (scratch/cache/etc)

- Performance when editing (what?), panning, zooming (small or large doc?)

- Performance with a large number of simple objects, or complex objects (components? variables? nested components? drop shadows/background blurs?)

I haven't personally done some performance comparisons between the two apps since ~2018 but at the time there were definitely things where Figma was noticeably faster than sketch, a lot of things that were comparable, some things that were slower. My own very biased feeling was that Figma was faster more often than not but it's always up to the individual use case, how their file is setup, what they are doing within that file, and how they mentally weigh those different scenarios.

I definitely didn't feel like being on the web was a limiting factor. In some theoretical state, with infinite resources to optimize everything, native could be faster since you have access to lower-level APIs. In practice, that's the same argument as "it could be faster in hand-written assembly". Almost never did we get to the point where we'd use those abilities even if we had them, due to their cost on development and impact on the correctness/maintainability of the code.

  > It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. It’s just that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness.

yep, even though i personally prefer sketch, if i was running a company i'd most likely go with figma as well because of the collaborative capabilities; its just a huge productivity boost for collaborative teams

Plus then designers, devs and stakeholders can participate on any OS they wish to use. Which, at least to me, is still important.

thats the biggest one probably; saw it firsthand at a large company that was using sketch but managers and others using windows or devs on linux wanted to see the designs for work and nobody was gonna change to mac for that so figma it was...

After the Adobe/Figma deal fell through a few years ago I thought they might breath new life into XD, it's a good program that integrates with your Creative Cloud libraries. No idea why they've put it on ice, especially without Figma.

The perception at the time was that Adobe had abandoned UX designers and wasn't willing to tailor any of their tools to them. So they (we) moved on.

I was at a SXSW session with XD's product team in the early weeks/months of that products existence. The Q&A section was filled with a lot of dismissive statements and questions. XD was never going to survive.