Hey everyone
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