New in Sketch: Smart Animate, Library replacements and more!

Hey everyone :wave:

We’re excited to share with you our latest update! Since we rolled out our new prototype player earlier in the year, we’ve been able to ship great updates to our prototyping tools — and this release is no different.

With today’s update, we’re introducing Smart Animate — a new way to add animations to your prototypes. Along with this, we’ve brought Color Variables to gradients, greatly improved PDF exports, and made it quick and easy to replace Libraries — and so much more!

You can open the Mac app right now to get the update, or keep reading more to find out more.

Smart Animate in prototypes

We’ve had requests for animation in prototypes for a while, and it’s finally here! In the Prototype tab of the Inspector, you’ll see a new animation option — Smart Animate — that animates changes between layers with matching names.

If you’ve used Magic Move in Keynote, you’ll know how this works. There are a variety of easing options to choose from and you can customize the animation duration to get things moving just right.

There’s also a new dissolve option that gives a nice smooth fade between layers and Artboards. And we’ve added those easing and duration options to the existing slide animation. Smart Animate can animate the most obvious layer properties — position, size, shape, color and blending modes, opacity, and rotation.

We’ve put together a blog post that covers a few ways you can use Smart Animate, so check it out if you want to know more.

Replace Libraries

You can now replace the underlying Library for all Components in a document (or a specific Component type) by heading to Edit > Replace Library. This replaces all Components with the same name with their counterpart in the replacement Library. For more control, you can select specific Components (usually Symbols) on the Canvas and choose Edit > Replace Selected Components to replace the underlying Library for just those Components.

Color Variables in gradients

We know it’s been a long time coming, but you can now use Color Variables in gradients. Nothing else to say about this one, we’re just glad it’s here and hopefully you are too!

Over on the web app

Plus, over on the web app we’ve given the UI a refresh and made it possible for developers to export any layer without it needing to be set in the Mac app first.

As ever, you can see everything that we’ve added, changed and fixed in the release notes. And of course, we’d love to know what you think! We’re listening right here in the forum.

Enjoy!

PS: If you want to see what’s next, check out our roadmap :eyes:

13 Likes

Love it. One of the best releases I’ve ever seen at Sketch. Just need me some auto layout, and we’ll be off to the races :sketchy_cool:

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Also just fyi, on iPhone, the videos on the “what’s new” page load at 0:00-0:00 and won’t play for me.

Also, as reported in the past, I can’t seem to successfully upload a video to a comment. Today (from my phone) it hung at 100% for 10 mins before I gave up. Was a short iPhone screen recording (~4 seconds).

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Thank you for letting us know, Eric! I’m not experiencing any issues on my end, but I’ll look into what could be causing the problem and get it fixed. :pray:

Regarding uploading the video, are you referring to uploading it while replying in the forum? We’ll check that out as well!

P.S. We’re working hard on getting auto layout ready for you to try. It’s not ready for the beta yet, but we’re happy with the progress we’ve made so far!

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Yeah, I’m referring to the video upload within a comment. Also, it seems the ability to upload an image is broken for me in the same way — this time it went to 100% upload quickly, then stayed for about a minute, then suddenly went down to 42%, and then I gave up a minute or two after. Funny enough, it went down to 21% just before I went to delete it.

It’s again a great update!

The last demo document in the blog, the one with the navigation, can’t be opened in version 101. It is made in a newer (so probably internal) version of Sketch.

Thanks, Tom!

I checked, and I was able to open all the demos in the latest version of Sketch (101). Could you provide a screenshot of the warning or error you’re seeing? That would help me figure out what’s going wrong. Thanks in advance!

Oh weird, it does work now! :+1:

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The update videos still aren’t working for me – now on Mac Sequoia Safari (previously reported via iOS).
Err…now they are? They just suddenly began to work. I went to check dev tools and they just work now. No idea why (I didn’t open dev tools – they just spontaneously all loaded; internet is/was fine). Working on iPhone now too. So weird.

Image upload from clipboard is working on both MacOS and iOS here for me now. :+1:

  • yeah… it doesn’t work when you’re using instances from a linked library. It doesn’t change a single component - nor does color replacer. And “Find and Replace” color isn’t working either. Find and replace color WAS working, and now it won’t replace colors for instances from a Linked Library.

Does the replaced components retain the original text and overrides?

Hi @gr8fl4295 yes! Any overrides you have on your instances will be kept when you use the Replace Library or Replace selected components new features!

Let us know how it goes and if you run into any issues :raised_hands:

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