I just realized that since Sketch is making ground-breaking changes in the next update, it means most of the (still somewhat working) third-party plugins will be rendered completely broken.
This of course has happened numerous times before with major Sketch updates, and it was never a big deal. But this time it is a bug deal, because this time there’s no developer community left to step in and fix those vital plugins.
(the below passage is directed at Sketch folks, in the unlikely event they end up in this thread)
I see Sketch making attempts to contact some of the plugin developers and encourage them to update their plugins?
The thing is – and please take it as a healthy bit of criticism from someone so invested in Sketch that I still frequent this forum despite no longer being paid to work in/on the ecosystem –
Your wording here is tone-deaf at best, and insulting at worst:
If I recall correctly, you’ve made a concise decision to abandon third-party developers:
- by soft-deprecating the current plugin system without actually telling anyone it’s being deprecated
- by throwing a shade at the developer community because we couldn’t build anything non-trivial with the limited and stagnating JS API (which was already soft-deprecated by you at this point, and thus getting no updates, or really just a clear vision for its future) – so we had to rely on unsafe and flaky native APIs.
- not providing an API backwards compatibility shim in the upcoming Sketch update so that older plugins would remain operational (or maybe I just missed that, in which case please forgive my ignorance)
And now you basically say “hey please consider updating your plugins you haven’t been working on for years since you burned out of Sketch plugin ecosystem – because apparently our customers need your plugins to work, and they will complain to us about this, and it’s bad for business”.
I don’t know, it’s tacky. You could’ve just go to this forum (because you’ve shut down that one other place that was arguably a way better option for this kind of communications), find 2 or 3 people (me included) who frequently chime in plugin-related threads, and just ask nicely if we’d like to work on fixing some open-source (or even closed-source) plugins for funs and maybe a honorable mention somewhere. This would work on me personally.