Hey everyone 
We have a new beta of our Mac app ready for you to try!
How do I get it?
You can download our beta from sketch.com/beta — you’ll need an active subscription or license to use it. If you already have a beta build, you can open it and follow the prompts to update.
How do I share feedback?
If you run into any issues, the best way to share them with us is to click on the 
Send Beta Feedback button in the toolbar. This should open a email template in your email client of choice to fill and send to us.
What’s in this beta?
Taking Smart Layout beyond Symbols
If you’ve been following along in Labs for a while now, you’ll know that we’ve been working on Smart Layout in groups since March. We’re now at a point where we’d like to open up this work to everyone!
You can now use Smart Layout with groups, Artboards and Symbols. Better still, it behaves far more predictably. You’ll notice many UI and quality-of-life improvements, including Layer List icons, keyboard shortcuts, Foresight support, and the ability to pause Smart Layout temporarily on a group or Artboard. We also fixed plenty of bugs along the way.
Big thanks to everyone who tested this (looking at you: @jkilp, @eurlichallan, @joe, @dale, @valentin, @AACourt, @KarlCanBeCool, @Dave, @leohans, @Giancarlo, @fab1An, @flowxd_io, @vattic, @rachael, @noe, @samvermette, @srkkrs) — your insights, feedback, critiques, and words of encouragement were invaluable.
Here’s a quick summary of these improvements:
- First and foremost, you can now apply Smart Layout settings to groups and Artboards, not just Symbols.
- As well as applying Smart Layout settings in the Inspector, you can now use keyboard shortcuts. Make your selection, then press ⌘L followed by ←,H,→,↑,V, or ↓ to set your layout direction.
- Speaking of layout directions, we’ve improved the iconography in the Layer List so all layers with Smart Layout properties now indicate this.
- There are a whole host of different things that can trigger Smart Layout to resize your group, Artboard or Symbol and affect its contents, including:
- Deleting layers
- Resizing layers
- Scaling layers
- Hiding layers
- Adjusting spacing between evenly spaced layers using Smart Distribute handles
- Editing the content of text layers
- Editing font properties for a text layer
- Swapping or resizing Symbols to fit
- Replacing/swapping images with different dimensions
- Duplicating a layer (including duplicating a layer within a group and duplicating a layer by Option-dragging into a group)
- Adding a layer to a group by dragging (we’ll show you some guides to indicate this, and you can hold Control to opt out of it)
- If you make a change in the Inspector to resize or move a layer where Smart Layout applies, Foresight now shows you how that will impact other layers.
- If you need to make changes to a layer in a group, Artboard or Symbol without triggering Smart Layout, you can now press ⌘⌥L to pause Smart Layout temporarily and tweak away. Smart Layout will resume once you clear your selection.
- Finally, if you turn a group into a Symbol or Artboard, or do the reverse, any Smart Layout properties it has will persist through that change.
We’re excited to see how you make use of the new flexibility that Smart Layout in groups offers. As ever, if you run into any bugs or have any feedback, do let us know. It makes a big difference and helps us roll out an even better final release.
Other enhancements and improvements
- If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a beachball when trying to copy and paste large Artboards between pages and documents, this release puts an end to that. After all, it’s the end of Summer (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) and it’s time to put those beachballs away.
- Tired of endlessly tinkering with override settings? We added a checkbox to quickly enable or disable all overrides in a Symbol source.
You can find a full list of release notes, including changes and bug fixes at sketch.com/beta.
Enjoy!
