Sending developers to our full Sketch file still feels very messy, with them having access to every single artboard and symbol in the file. Our Zeplin projects are usually a tiny subset of our Sketch files, and we like to control which screen developers should be able to see or not.
On top of that Zeplin shows device-sizes thumbnails when browsing screens whereas Sketch displays some weird tv-shaped thumbnail (unless you’re using the Pages view which similarly to what I said above feels messy).
The inspector view works well (although I find it a bit slow to load).
Using Zeplin really feels silly at this point (let alone paying for it!) and we’d much rather use Sketch but theses 2 issues are really making it hard to adopt. Are we the only ones feeling this way? Or is there a better way to do dev handoff using Sketch Cloud?
I had a conversation with our lead dev last Friday about the Sketch-Webapp vs Zeplin.
They were missing the feature of being able to categorise comments in Sketch. In Zeplin it is possible to separate comments for the developers from comments for the stakeholders or customers or the editors who make the content.
It would be enough here if, for example, you could assign colours for different types of comments.
This would make it easy for developers to recognise comments that are relevant to them and distinguish them from those that are irrelevant.
We currently do this using various emojis that we place in front of each comment … as a workaround, so to speak.
As I mentioned here: Images changed by override in symbol instances should be exportable I would very much appreciate it if images that I have changed within symbol instances via override were also exportable, provided that I have set the image layer in the symbol to exportable.
To clarify my feedback about the way Sketch displays thumbnails vs Zeplin, here is what the same screen and its variants look like in Sketch vs Zeplin.
Zeplin just feels like it was designed for mobile handoff, whereas Sketch has those weird tiny desktop-shaped previews. Hovering the thumbnails has some zoom effect but that’s not really helpful either.
That’s helpful but… I simply wish devs wouldn’t have access to everything else in the document at all.
I heard some designers do an “External” version of their file that they use for dev handoff, which itself links to their working version. Is that standard practice? If that is the case then we might just do that and start experimenting more with Sketch Cloud so we can stop sending $50,000/y to Zeplin for something that’s baked into Sketch.
Any thoughts on the feedback regarding odd-shaped thumbnails I reported above?
That could be one of the ways you can put in place a workflow right now, yes.
Our team is constantly looking into this experience (sharing), and we have shared these bits of feedback with the team in charge so they can take a look. As you mention, and we agree, there’s room for improvement here and truly appreciate you sharing this with us!
Thumbanils:
What you want here is for the thumbnail to fit the Artboard you’re showing (as Zeplin does)
This is non-trivial when working with same-sized Artboards, but having a combination of them on the same Page/Document could prove tricky to show on the web app.
Maybe we could play around with aspect ratio and adjust the preview like that?
I’m giving this a try because Zeplin became seriously unreliable since they switched to an Electron app a few weeks ago.
The “external file” approach turns out to be quite inconvenient, where you have to constantly sync your librairies anytime you want to make a change. Sending dev to your actual working file appears to be the best path forward.
Putting aside the question of limiting access to content and thumbnails format, how is the “Copy Link from Position” feature supposed to work? I try generating links from various positions in the canvas and it always sends me to a slightly different position in the canvas. What is Sketch using as the reference point? is it the cursor, some corner of the screen? I can’t figure this out.
Is there a way to get the position from within the Mac app? Usually when I want to direct my colleagues to a specific place, I’m working inside the app.
