With this rate of focused upgrades … Sketch is going to be competitive with Figma in a few months.
I’m hoping that the 6 months it took to go from 99 to 100 and the ~4.5 months it took to go from 100 to 101 can be reduced to 3 months for the next few updates. Both 100 and 101 were massive, especially when you factor in the work that happened outside of the Mac App. Perhaps fewer projects will need to be juggled over the next year outside of the core app, which could theoretically make this possible.
The last 6 months have been massive at Sketch; I’d be really curious to know what changed. Something did, and it’s fantastic. I can actually almost use Sketch as my primary tool again. Moar!
Thanks for the compliment @Phy ! We appreciate it.
You mentioned ‘almost’—what would you need to change that?
Related to the releases: there are a couple of features (this being one of them) that we could release relatively quickly. It seems logical to then also release them quickly, perhaps before the end of year, even if it means the next release may not be as large as the previous one.
I don’t want to pin an exact date to it yet, because there may be unforeseen hurdles along the way.
You mentioned ‘almost’—what would you need to change that?
I’m planning to deep dive into Sketch with a massive project(s) once auto layout and variants are released and reasonably feature-complete (padding and local-vs-global variant support are critical for these, among many other [hopefully] obvious inclusions). The main reason I’m waiting is because I’ve done multiple organization-wide refactors to accommodate design software updates in the past, and I’m not willing to start a new project knowing it will require a huge refactor shortly after instantiation.
That said, I haven’t done anything beyond single file solo projects in Sketch in the last 5 years – I almost gave up on Sketch after I’d been an active community member and user during the prior 5 years. I worked /w both InVision Studio and Figma’s internal team for a couple years as an outside contributor, but when Dylan announced Figma’s Adobe acquisition, I retracted my support. And of course, InVision Studio never took off. I strongly considered contributing to Penpot, but ironically I found them difficult to work with, and I believe they will fail under current management.
So I’m left with Sketch, the product I’ve always want to love (and once did, long ago), and Figma (my daily driver), the product that finally does almost everything I want a design tool to do (I spent years frustrated with their dev cycle as well, but it finally came around – they’re only missing a select few key things now).
Anyways, I wrote that because it’s plausible that changing my “almost” could require more than what I’m currently aware of once I really dig into Sketch again. If things continue to both go well and improve (e.g. not being afraid to sprinkle small features into x.x releases (e.g. 101.2, 101.3, etc)) at a good pace, then things may be looking very good indeed.
Also apologies – I’m aware this discussion isn’t really related to this forum topic
Interesting point from @Ash – maybe you can rethink how you release features. I can see in the roadmap that there is a bunch of improvements planned (great!) for next beta and they are all probably going to be all in one release. What if instead you release smaller updates more often? I know you are so far used to shipping like this, but waiting for the beta for a few months, then also waiting for the final release takes too much time at this point.
Maybe decoupling features and releasing smaller updates would make sense. Some updates probably need a thorough updates to Sketch and make sense to be a big update, but in-between you could have feature releases. Thoughts?
Not to further derail the conversation @Phy but this massively resonates with me as well. I’ve been mostly in Figma land since around 2018/19 but never “loved” it the way I once loved Sketch. I was looking for an out around the time of the Adobe deal and during some pretty irresponsible rollout of features and config this year was kind of the last straw with the repositioning towards PMs and AI BS. My personal/freelance projects have all be migrated to sketch and will stay there now indefinitely. My current team use Figma still but going forward I’m going to be advocating for Sketch as well provided this inertia remains.
I’d personally take lots of small releases that chip away at polish and help close the gap over, big shouty releases. It does a lot to remind people that sketch is still here and the most viable alternative to Figma. Penpot is very rough around the edges and I think trying to replicate Figma 1:1 is a terrible idea.
I had forgotten that despite some workflow shortcomings, Sketch is not only SO close, but also legitimately fun to use
Thanks, everyone, for the interesting insights. I’ve noted the feedback regarding faster releases.
The next release will be soon, and I expect we can share the beta by mid-October (though I can’t make any definite promises). Please note that this beta won’t include Auto/Flex Layout yet, but it will contain some frequently requested features such as Flexible Text Styles and Markdown in text overrides.
Regarding how frequently we release, it really depends on how long development takes. Some features may seem easy or straightforward but require quite a bit of work. This may be an interesting example. Additionally, we aim for stable releases, so thorough testing is necessary, and we also want to address a reasonable number of bugs before release. All in all, the release needs to be a package we’re satisfied with. In the case of version 100, that took a while.
