what are your favorite tools that you miss having there?
There are a lot of people saying the same here @paulozoom - the users of the software - you really need to listen to them.
The new tool bar is overall a worse user experience, this needs to be accepted by Sketch and then either reverted or improved upon as the users are asking for.
At least explain why the change was made - it wasnât something that was an obvious issue to users, the comments since the launch showed it was one thing that was clearly loved.
There so much wasted space in the new toolbar, why do we need hidden menus? It seems the header only changes when âpenâ is selected, and âshapesâ has a dropdown.
The customisable header was a thing of greatness.
2 Likes
I understand and respect your opinion and preference, but have to be honest weâre not making it fully customizable as it was before anytime soon, perhaps ever (donât know the future) â itâs just too big of an ask for the architecture we have now. If there are buttons that you miss having there, please let us know so we consider adding.
I believe we have in various places where we marketed the release. But here it goes:
- We thought a fixed toolbar is a poor fit for a workflow with clearly distinct âmodesâ. Thereâs a big difference between having no selection, having a selection (and its count and type(s)), and being in a specific edit mode (e.g. vector editing). Having a contextual toolbar lets us make efficient use of little space (e.g. a 14âł display). Before, if you were e.g. in vector editing, or had no selection, most of the tools would be disabled. This also made us jam tools awkwardly into the inspector in bitmap or vector editing modes.
- The prior fixed stock macOS toolbar made updates to the toolbar difficult. If we add a new useful feature we think ought to be in the toolbar (e.g. image background removal), where does it go? Your customization impacts that. Plus, we couldnât easily make it appear only for images.
- The macOS standard toolbar wasnât a good fit for our design. It tied our hands in terms of how the toolbar could be placed and sized. A totally custom toolbar didnât.
- We foresaw reactions that the toolbar changes based on selection, but we didnât feel this was actually a problem in practice after a while. The inspector also changes based on the selection, even more so: controls arenât always in the same place, or they donât exist at all based on the layer type, and adding new properties (stack layout, more styles) shifts the controls below them. We all use an inspector just fine, arguably even more so than the toolbar, even though itâs even more contextual. We felt the same about the new toolbar.
2 Likes
@paulozoom Hereâs one for you âRound to Pixelâ. I use that a lot and hate remembering yet another shortcut.
But the real issue isnât what weâre âmissing,â itâs how we want the app configured to best support our workflow. Limiting flexibility and trying to make the app âsmartâ enough to decide what I do or donât need doesnât feel like progress.
2 Likes
Thatâs a good shout, we should make this more accessible. I think there may be a better way than the toolbar, will have a look at this.
After re-reading this thread, I have to agree.. you are either not listening to the user feedback or doing your best to avoid having to revert back to the previous, better design. Users donât really care about âfitting into your architectureâ. You keep asking âWhat toolbar icons are you missing?â. What everyone is saying is that - before - we could decide what toolbar icons we want by customizing the toolbar. This is what made working in Sketch effortless.
Now itâs a mode nightmare where the toolbar icons are buried in menus. Bad idea. No justification for this - it worked well before - even with an overflow menu on small displays.
One of the things we liked about the old Sketch was that it wasnât klunky like Figma. Now it seems like you are aping all the bad UX in Figma.. when you had a clear advantage before.
As a simple test, video common tasks comparing the old version and the new version - and count the clicks.
4 Likes
Yes, this is closer to the truth of the matter which is that Sketch is abandoning long running Mac UX. Customizable toolbars are just one such thing.
Iâve seriously been trying to work with this really disastrous version.. but I keep stumbling over really silly things that should have been caught in both usability testing and in QA/QC. My guess is that very little time was spent on that, instead relying on user feedback from paying customers to do the work for you. I am only saying this as a heads up - that many people are talking about the immense problems in this latest version in my organization - and we are actively looking at an alternative because of this.
Case in point.. the re-imagined contextual toolbar is a major fail! Nothing but a series of mindless icons that appear and reappear depending on what context the user is in. This is âmodes 101â - Donât do modes!!! This is a well known usability issue that has been around for 30+ years! I only discovered today, that the shapes menu in some modes is buried under several other contextual menus and you can only get to it by hitting the Esc key several times! Before in the static toolbar it was ONE click to draw a rectangle - now it is multiple clicks within a convoluted myriad of interactions to try to discover how to draw a SQUARE.
The final kicker is the attached picture. I looked up today and was puzzled by the hieroglyphics at the top of my screen. What the..
Anyway this is the last free advice I can give you. Itâs sad that this was once such an elegant interface - but has radically gone off the rails. Unfortunately we canât wait around and the ship is sailing..
1 Like
You can always get to the shapes menu via the + button in the toolbar, aka the Insert menu (shown below). We also have the Insert menu in the macOS menu bar. You can also press R to insert a rectangle at any time, as the menu item indicates, which to many users is the go-to way to add a rectangle.
Yeah, not ideal with text below, weâll have a look at improving this, thanks! Meanwhile, if you want to have a material behind the toolbar, I suggest you enable the rulers.