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.
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'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.
> "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.
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.
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!
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/
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.
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.
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...
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...).
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.
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 :)
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 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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] sboak|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] FormFollowsFunc|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] usaphp|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] M4v3R|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Matsta|10 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] zippergz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bgnm2000|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webwielder2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ux-app|10 years ago|reply
Hope it's of some use to others.
[+] [-] fnordsensei|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] luckydata|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buserror|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mortenjorck|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] howlingfantods|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] btown|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johns|10 years ago|reply
Edit: Meant Numbers, said Sheets.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archagon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckydata|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tloewald|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mortenjorck|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] waffl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriro|10 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] greatjones|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bovermyer|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] Mtinie|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] j_s|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjkaplan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markbao|10 years ago|reply
I wonder if future versions will have auto-sizing for symbols so that buttons can expand in size dynamically.
[+] [-] asadlionpk|10 years ago|reply
[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.
[+] [-] easytiger|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] littleweep|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makenova|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akcreek|10 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] anthonyko|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCayG894faBz8UIKFH6uOMvA
[+] [-] kawera|10 years ago|reply
And a collection on Medium: https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources
[+] [-] jjcm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisodeic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrRobinson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fractallyte|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] wiradikusuma|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] st3v3r|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kyriakos|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tillinghast|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ryan-allen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamcreasy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fractallyte|10 years ago|reply