Definitely some cool and interesting new features here, but these are all “nice to haves”. From a productivity standpoint there’s a lot of bugs that are causing major frustrations. I’d rather have a reliable app with the basics working then anything in this release…
“Tidy” straight up doesn’t work and will mess up your designs
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It used to find the “most common” interval between objects and apply that to all. Currently it behaves the same as “distribute”, picking an average distance between layers.
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Not only that, it will also reorder layers on the canvas (left to right or top to bottom). This leaves you even worse off, creating an even greater problem than you had before using this feature.
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It also makes the assumption that want to “align an edge” (e.g. when using Tidy with a horizontal list of objects that don’t share the same height it will align the top edges, even when you already had them vertically center aligned.)
IMPACT: Not being able to quickly standardize the distance between layers means you can’t use “smart distribute” or “smart reordering”, which are amazing features!
SOLUTION: Kill the Tidy button. Even when it worked it was unpredictable. It might put things in a line… it might put things in a grid… it might guess the right distance between layers… it might not…
All that’s needed is the Butter plugin to be add to the native align presets (Menu Bar: Arrange > Align > “add here”) . 1. Start from the the left, right, top, bottom… 2. put X pixels between each layer… and 3. have a short cut for 0px because that’s what you want 90% of the time. Copying Butter would be a 10x simpler feature to build and would do what users want 100% of the time.
“Back to Instance” button breaks when it is overlapping a layer.
That little button that pops up in the top left when you drill into a symbol. It’s so useful. It’s been around since day one. It’s literally what makes working with symbols possible. Currently out only works when there’s nothing underneath it. If there is I now have to zoom/scroll my canvas until it doesn’t overlap. anything, then I can press it. This is such a global… core… basic navigation… feature that is broken.
IMPACT: Huge. This is a primary way to navigate the app. If you drilled into a symbol to make changes, there’s a 90% chance you’re going to want to return to see the effect of those changes.
SOLUTION: Figure out what’s happening with the “z-index” (or whatever it’s called in native apps). Also just add this to the menu bar so we can setup a hotkey for this, please!
“Create a Symbol” puts new symbols on random pages.
Sometime there’s a “Send symbol to X page” checkbox at the bottom of the “create a symbol” modal, but not always… I can’t figure out why. If the box is not available or of it’s not checked it sometimes puts the master symbol on the current page (as expected), but sometimes put’s it on a random page and you have to realize this, and move it to somewhere logical before you forget and loose it forever (or a just really confused).
IMPACT: Again, this is huge. Symbols are kinda Sketch’s thing. Creating new ones shouldn’t be hard.
SOLUTION: This I don’t know…
“Instances” forget their size when their master is edited
I’ll create a symbol, give the layers inside it fixed heights, widths, pin things to edges… I may even set the layout so that it can grow in a particular direction… Then I’ll use instances of this symbol, either stretching them myself or letting them resize automatically by adding longer text in the override… but as soon as I go and edit the master symbol all the stances forget what size they were and revert back to the original size of the master symbol, causing me to have to manually go in and resize each layer. Actually just installing this v100 update caused a lot of my symbols to break this way
IMPACT: This is a major time suck. I’m repeating mindless work that I’ve already done. As a work around I try to keep my masters the same size as my instances, but that’s not always possible.
SOLUTION: I don’t know…
Dragging layers in the layer list is unreliable.
Often when trying to reorder layers in the layer list I make my selection, click-to-drag but they don’t move. I have to try a second or third time before I’m able to move the layers.
IMPACT: Medium, but this seems like a native MacOS interface component and I haven’t experienced this in any other app.
SOLUTION: I don’t know…
Use custom nudging settings for nudges everywhere…
Having this setting is unexpected, but it’s so incredibly nice to have. Customizing the intervals for nudging and shift-nudging is such a time saver. 10px is a great shift-nudge default, but I use 8px since it scales nicely for screens (8, 16, 24, 32, 64, 144, 246, 1080, 1920, etc…)
Some fields in the inspector obey this setting like x positions, y position, width, hight (holding shift and using the arrows gives you ±8px), others do not like vertical/horizontal distance between, font size, blur, shadows, border width (they still default to ±10)… it’s weird. e.g. I’ll shift-nudge something (8px) from the bottom edge of an artboard, then shift-nudge the shadow (10px)… now 2px of shadow is being cut off on the export and it looks bad. There’s other examples too, but this is maybe the most obvious.
IMPACT: This is admittedly small, but it’s a “crossing your t’s and dotting your i’s’” type thing. If someone takes the time to change their settings then they probably want to be the same everywhere.
SOLUTION: All shift-nudges on the canvas and in the inspector should be the same (whatever you put in the app settings)… Unless it’s a percentage, which is base-10 by default. So things like opacity or scaling, there may be other settings with percentages I’m forgetting…