Sketch 3.7 released (opens in new tab)

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!

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.....

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

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

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/

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

Have you seen PaintCode?

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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).

Have you tried Invision?

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...

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.