May this already exist and I don’t have to use it, but here we go:
I would love to preview mobile versions in my phone (ipad would be nice too) emulating different devices with a pixel density 1:1. I mean. I don’t own several phones, so being able to emulate other devices may help evaluate how the font, buttons, etc size will work on them. I don’t care if the size of the preview is smaller or even overflows the phone (it should be able to be panned, for sure).
What I usually do is to have an artboard with the size of my actual phone and placing the elements just like in the bigger/smaller phone to preview. But it’s not a fluid workflow.
This would be extremely useful. No prototyping software gets this correct: Sketch, Adobe XD, Figma, etc. When you add the 16 MacBook Pro artboard preset to your workspace, it is the actual scale of the physical device. All of the mobile artboard sizes are HUGE in comparison.
I frequently create mobile and desktop artboards next to each other so I can prototype them side by side. No phone is as tall as a laptop screen (at least I hope not), yet the iPhone 13 mini artboard preset is almost the same height as the 16" MacBook Pro artboard preset.
This directly translates to the emulator which scales everything the same size as the arboard.
Hello. Welcome to the forum.
The Artboard looks that size on the MacBook screen because iPhones have a much higher DPI than Macs. We’re creating the Artboard with the right amount of pixels, and we default to a 100% zoom level because that way you get the clearest render – but that does mean that it shows up bigger on your screen compared to your iPhone.
What the iOS simulator must be doing is to prefer a more correct visual size over rendering fidelity/accuracy - which makes sense for them. For a design app though I think it makes sense to prioritise fidelity.
If you want to see it at the same size the the iOS simulator renders you should zoom out to probably something like 60%? We could zoom out to that level when you insert an iOS artboard but I think that’d upset more people than it please, so I think we should stick to the current behaviour,
It’s good to understand the thinking below the implementation.
All that said, It would be amazing to have the tools to measure the screen in order to let Sketch calculate a proper 100% scale based on size instead of pixels when needed. Sometimes we need to emulate a device we don’t have to have an aprox idea of how big things are going to be.
Autocad let’s you draw a square on the screen an you can measure it with a ruler and enter the actual dimensions as parte of the configuration. With that information, Autocad is able to handle the scale preview in a better way (plus, back in the era of non-square pixels, that helped to avoid eggs instad of circles).
There’s good reasons for both approaches and I agree that fidelity should trump visual accuracy. But I also feel like this could be a helpful option when trying to assess font and button sizes etc. Could it be added as an option in the Prototype viewer?
