Feels like it. Don’t get me wrong, I think sketch is great, but no way i’m going into apple’s walled garden voluntarily. Very happy that figma works on linux.
There is a whole world of difference. Figma's servers can be down when you need it to work, developers might want to 'phase out' the function you need, or introduce some changes that would totally break your workflow, and you will be absolutely powerless to do anything about it but conform.
With locally running app you control when and where the app works, and you have way more options when developer introduces some changes that don't fit you.
Not to mention sensitive design documents that must stay on-prem can't be uploaded to cloud services like Figma (I don't know if this is possible to do in Figma somehow? I've never looked into it)
Meh. I can't open any of our old sketch files at work because I don't have a valid license for a version that works on the newest OS. All the same as being locked out of a server in the moment.
This does not make any sense, newer versions of Sketch open old files just fine, and licences are valid for any version.
Maybe you were trying to say that you can't open new sketch files because your version of macOS doesn't support latest versions of Sketch? That is, indeed, a problem. However, if you work only with internal files, you can simply abstain from upgrading to new version and keep working on the version that works for you. Moreover, Sketch licences do not 'expire', you simply can't receive updates any longer. So you can still work with your files as long as you need, not relying on someone else's actions.
I want to get things done. I value concrete benefits now versus theoretical potential benefits in the future. I'm looking for tools to help me get work done and not a religious philosophy.
That's exactly how China become an economical superpower, while at the same being environmentally irresponsible and lacking any semblance of human rights. People just wanted cheap stuff that gets the work done, rather than what's right.
By paying for any tool you are strengthening its position and philosophy, whether you care about it or not.
Since you want to make it political. It's how every country ever became an economic superpower. Then many decided to clean up their acts since they could divert resources to it at little relative cost. The countries that tried to do the right thing from the beginning didn't get into that club. Most of them then were destroyed by the superpowers in one conflict or another. Moral of that story is to be pragmatic until you're at the top since otherwise it won't much matter.
Presumably - Sketch is great software, well built, but the fact that in late 2020 they still have to write "And soon, the ability to collaborate in real-time" is the the best counter-argument to building native for me personally.
of course not, but the effort to bring real-time collaboration to native apps is much higher, e.g. MS Office's still-poor current experience compared with Google Docs's capabilities 5 years ago
How does the existence of Google Docs and Word say anything about how hard it is to create real-time collaboration on a web application versus a native application?
Not really. It all comes down to a network protocol to sync changes. I collaborated with others just fine in desktop-first apps like CounterStrike or Diablo long before web became a viable platform.
The reason MS Office struggles with this is that rebuilding an app that wasn't originally supposed to work in such mode is way harder than building from scratch, and they probably don't really need it that much to push themselves in such an adventure.
There’s no technical reason why that would be true. What is true is if you have an app and doc format that weren’t designed for real-time collaboration, it’ll be really hard to retrofit, regardless of your choice of app platform.
This is somewhat orthogonal, but I don’t understand the draw of real-time collaboration.
As a designer, I’d much rather collaborate via the Git-like system of Abstract, committing changes and merging pull requests than have things happening elsewhere in the file I’m working on with no versioning or notification.
Real-time collaboration has never been in demand among developers, has it?
Collaboration doesn’t necessarily mean designing at the same time, it’s not really how any designers I know use it. It’s being able to walk through a design, leave comments, use it for quickly showing off an idea within a file, having another designer point you to a shared component/asset/prototype. We even use it for retrospectives and hangouts.
I think the reason that people want real-time collaboration has been that merging diffs, which is already a hassle for code, has historically not really been possible for designers. With realtime collaboration, you can have people working in parallel without having to solve the merging problem.
It'd take a lot for me to leave Figma for another tool, performances are rock-solid on my 2015 low-end MBP in the browser, granted I'm not working on the most complex UIs but I've yet to see limitations.
> software that takes advantage of the reliability and consistency of that ecosystem
probably true ~4-5 years ago, but not so much today. Catalina broke a lot of apps (due to SIP?). Big Sur is likely to break even more existing apps. In one case, it was seen that Apple apps do not obey the same rules that third party developers must abide by (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816).
I use a mbp at this point because it's not Windows.
I'm 80% certain that my next computer is going to be either a desktop or a ThinkPad X1 running Arch. A lot of what I do doesn't require a Mac, and frankly I enjoy Linux more.
That's basically what I did. After my last Mac died a few years ago I dusted off an older Mac and purchased a new ThinkPad P50. I thought it would take me most of a couple years to get as comfortable with Linux as I was with macOS. Instead it took just one month for the ThinkPad to become my main driver and another two months before I mothballed the Mac.
The only thing I really, really miss is OmniGraffle.
>> I use a mbp at this point because it's not Windows.
Precisely the same. I used to be a big fan of the Apple ecosystem. When Jobs said the customer doesn't know what they need, he was usually right... he of course was a gifted visionary. Apple has continued with the same mindset but without the gifted visionary, in some cases with comical decisions e.g., keyboard, touchbar, soldering SSD to logic boards with high failure rates).
Can't we just rustle up a few obscenely rich billionaires to donate a hundred million to develop an OS with a top priority of quality and usability rather than lock in.
> People uses Macs because they want to use Macs and software that takes advantage of the reliability and consistency of that ecosystem
ehhh. I think if you did some analytics of “apps Mac users use” an absolute ton would be “a web browser and very little else”. I can think of very few truly native Mac apps I depend upon and that keep me on the platform.
What does keep me on Macs is that every now and then I need to compile an iOS app. Apple give me no choice. Aside from that I’d say a lot of developers choose Macs because they’re the least worst POSIX platform, not because Mac native apps are a shining beacon on a hill.
Should I feel ashamed or something for saying yes? I hear all the bitching about how Electron is bloated, but I run Slack and VS Code all day and never have resource issues on my MBP.
No you dont have to be ashamed. If they run without any problems in your macbook pro then great. But they are massive resource hogs in my brother's PC where the RAM is limited to 8GB. Of course he complains that the slack app is quite heavy because he is not able to run a couple of other apps in parallel.
The solution we settled on is to run an android emulator and run slack and spotify in that. This restricts the usage to 500Mb and his PC is able to breathe a bit now
So I like Slack, the chat platform? I don’t. Do I like Slack, the Mac app? Honestly it’s fine. My problem isn’t with the app, it’s the amount of attention I have to give it. Making it native wouldn’t improve that.
I haven't really run into any issues with slack. It works quickly enough for what I need it to do and it doesn't use up enough resources for me to care about.
> What does keep me on Macs is that every now and then I need to compile an iOS app.
As a longtime Mac user, I really wish that Apple would make it possible to compile iOS apps on iPad. Not for myself, but for the developers who are only on the Mac for iOS development. I don't think it does anyone any good to force them to be in a place where they don't want to be. I have no ill will against iOS developers, but I also don't want them to transform the Mac into something non-Mac. Mac has always been a "niche" platform, and that's fine! Let the users who are here voluntarily stay, and let the users who are here only "by force" go to a platform that suits their needs better, perhaps iPad. If Xcode for iPad can facilitate that, I'm all in favor.
I have been getting by using a family member's machine to build iOS apps on, but if I were just on Mac to build iOS apps every now and then, I'd be complaining about Mac all day online honestly.
It's just not my cup of tea. Like water and oil together, but I'm sure for some people it's everything they want in a computer
This is great, but I no longer feel that the macOS HIG represents usable design for anybody. Apple's native apps are confusing and inconsistent. XCode is perhaps the worst offender. (Is that because it's okay to ship sub-par experiences to developers? )
My opinion is that Google's UX is now best in class -- things like Google Docs that are just nearing perfection that everyone seems to have no trouble with. Youtube would be another example of a highly effective UI.
Finding specific documents from all different people/domains when you have hundreds, with obfuscated urls, is a nightmare with docs/sheets. There is zero organisation.
They are obviously trying - I keep seeing things like workspaces and pinning docs that are obviously experiments in trying to fix it. But not there yet!
I do agree that the Google Suite of tools are very usable though.
I never miss an opportunity to publicly restate just how god-awful XCode is. I think it is literally the worst developer tool I have ever come across. I don’t think I have ever heard one good thing said about it.
Coming mostly from a Windows desktop background, I only started developing for Apple devices late on. Holy shit, I can’t believe people have been putting themselves through that horrible experience for the better part of two decades.
I think if you only use XCode and really get used to it through and through, it could be a good tool. But it is so unintuitive it's staggering, and does not have terribly advanced features for an IDE.
I think if you use Xcode enough you can come to like it. What it does well it does really well–I have yet to see something that bundles as many good, advanced tools for building, debugging, and profiling in one pretty package as Xcode does. Most of the hate for Xcode seems to (rightfully) be aimed at its instability when working with things like codesigning, devices, or source control–IMO this this because they have a different process internally for their use than external developers. If you really understand who Xcode is aimed at (Apple) and how it is supposed to work (Apple's workflows) you can generally understand it.
I'm the same and have been very disapointed with the whole Apple developer experience. Coming from C#/Visual Studio/Resharper to Xcode has been a huge step backwards. It's not just the tooling either, the documentation is nowhere near as comprehensive.
Having said that I despair at what Windows has become.
People who use Xcode long enough usually get through the phase where they hate it with every fiber of their being. It's like Stockholm syndrome, except you realize your captor wants you to be happy but is also kind of insane.
> things like Google Docs that are just nearing perfection
I'm completely baffled by this statement. The Google Docs UI hasn't changed since it was released ten years ago and it's just an imitation of Microsoft Word from the mid-nineties. What is good or special about it?
I respect them for sticking to this, but I think it's a mistake. It's clear users in general don't care about an app being pure Mac OS controls/SDKs/etc. and their claims about it being a truly superior UX are unfounded (having used both regularly, Figma disproves that heavily). With this, Sketch isn't available on Windows nor the web (until very recently it seems?).
> It's clear users in general don't care about an app being pure Mac OS controls/SDKs/etc.
They may not put it in those terms, but they do. They can tell when an app feels 'weird' or slow (be it actually slow or just higher latency). That depends a lot on the user base for the specific app in question. The more 'casual' the user base, the less it matters.
Being native also allows you to get functionality for free that other users may depend on. In OSX it translates to things like scripts, or more often, assistive devices, like screen readers.
I still don’t think the vast majority of users care. Slowness is something separate and I’d agree that a laggy interface is an awful one, especially with a visual tool like Sketch. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone make that complaint about Figma.
VS.Code users aren't exactly casual users and in the main are happy enough to use it as their main coding interface many hours per day (and yes I understand that this is HN so now there will be a bunch of people saying "I'm not happy).
I love the things VSCode offers that its competition doesn’t. I can’t imagine working with any of the other available editors for the Mac. I hate how I feel like I’m working in a weird web app all day every day. I feel both simultaneously.
Wanted to say I started taking a look yesterday and I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. But I don’t have my whole workflow set up yet. Thanks for the nudge, I’d been meaning to give it a look!
Swing is definitely not "less native" than Electron. The entire window is a web view in Electron apps. I believe Java Swing was even an officially supported UI toolkit on the Mac a long time ago.
On my laptop (6 core 3,9GHz 32GB RAM and NVME) VS Code is fast and responsive, still wastes lots of RAM though. Jetbrains tools meanwhile were way more laggy on the same setup.
I’ve always found Jetbrains stuff really laggy, even when I tried Clion on my current maxed out 16” MBP, to be honest it’s one of the things that has always put me off their software. The text entry might not be laggy but the general UI has that “laggy Java” (sorry, I know it’s not a Java fault but I just associate it with Java GUI apps!) feel. Personally I find VS Code much more responsive on the whole.
I love VSCode, but Electron apps are still pretty brutal on battery life, so it’s hard to work for very long without being plugged in. I’d personally love a pure native version for that reason alone, but the feature set wins out for day to day usage since I work mostly from home anyways.
I'm not involved with figma in any way, just a user. But from what I understand, it is written in c++ and uses webassembly. Some ui parts are in standard TS+css. [1]
There is absolutely no reason not to be responsive, low on memory and as powerful as a native app.
The backend is rust I believe. But at the end of the day I've used figma and the UI isn't anywhere near as responsive as a native app. You might not care about this but some people do.
I won’t go into why (as everyone here seems to be trying to convince everyone else, who aren’t really listening, anyway. I’m not really looking to change my viewpoint).
Figma is cool. I’m working with a designer, now, and we’ll see how it goes. Not sure I’d really say it was a direct Sketch competitor, though. I think Adobe Illustrator is Sketch’s biggest competitor, and that says a lot about Sketch.
Accessibility features are used by people regardless of whether they have visual accessibility issues. For example, I (and many others–watch some WWDC presentations closely and you'll see this) use the "display zoom" feature during presentations and when doing UI work to focus on things. The feature where you wiggle the mouse cursor to make it big? That's an accessibility feature, but it got a prime spot at the keynote when it was announced. I have subtitles enabled all the time since it helps me catch things in videos if I miss what someone said. macOS has text-to-speech, which is quite useful to read me back things I write for grammatical errors or typos. Accessibility features can and are used by everyone. (Disclaimer: I have partial colorblindness and wear glasses.)
You can use voiceover as a way to add a lot of context and “color” to a UI. I make a big effort to support voiceover in my apps. In fact, most of the text that I translate is never seen by the user[0].
On the Mac, I also like to use tooltips, applying the same string as voiceover.
of all the features you mention, except TTS none depend on the app being written in a specific framework as far as I know ?
(and I don't remember TTS not working in e.g. Qt apps for instance - at least I know that I sometimes bash my keyboards repeatedly to stop the damn thing that I opened by whatever goddamn shortcut :D)
This was a direct response to your comment, so I was mainly focused on what accessibility features I use. However, one I missed but I use all the time is being able to control applications using accessibility APIs.
I agree with you, and I think this is a pretty good signal that Sketch is REALLY feeling the heat from Figma, because they aren't offering a better argument besides "we're native". The bandwagon has clearly jumped off Sketch and onto Figma, and not because it's "fashionable", but because Figma is plain awesome.
Yep. Our company switched to Figma and it's been leaps and bounds better for productivity. Having multiple people working on the same design file at the same time has been huge.
It’s really not because multiplayer is there for walking through designs, leaving comments, or working with another designer. I work on a team of 10 and I don’t see anyone else in my designs unless I’m handing off to a dev or doing a review. At that point it’s amazing, as I can link anyone in our org a design and they can open it.
As someone who's worked on a lot of collaborative technology, I find it weird how most of the interest in collaborative editing is confined to the web. As I understand it, Figma's internal collaborative engine is written in C++ anyway.
Exactly for the sharing features people have been discussing. It may be OK for the design team to download the app, but product managers, devs, marketers and other stakeholders don't want to also have to go through the trouble of downloading the app.
A primary thing Figma understood better than pretty much anyone else is how collaboration among different teams (not just design) works in product development.
Collaboration all but requires being online (good offline collab is much harder to implement as you surely know), so that eliminates one of the main advantages of native apps.
Collaboration is also much more useful when you're not limited to only working with people using the same OS. Multi-platform distribution is built into web apps, but it takes a lot more effort to create good native apps on several platforms.
Also, of course, no need to install anything on the web, which is important for frictionless collaboration.
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It's no surprise that both desktop and mobile OS-s are very much not optimized for cross platform development. It's a feature (for owners of those OS-s), not a bug.
I don't know if they're feeling the heat since they seem like two different verticals. Sketch is a drawing app with support for some UI development workflows. Figma is workplace productivity software with support for some UI development workflows and drawing.
I love Sketch but it's closer to Illustrator or XD (at least, that's how I use it) than Figma. If they want to throw shade it should be at Adobe, since their interface is just better and app is faster/smaller/doesn't run six background daemons.
On a different note, I've heard multiple pitches where startups position themselves as "Figma for X" but never "Sketch for X." Figma is a platform that is building out into different markets, Sketch has much smaller applicability.
All I can say is I know of at least a couple of design teams that switched all of their workflows off Sketch and onto Figma, so seems like a direct competitor to me.
The thing IMO that really killed Sketch was not being able to share Sketch files with non-Mac users and let them open them up. They should have at least created a Windows/Linux (or web) viewer. They don't need edit functionality but nearly always someone in the approval/feedback process of a mockup will not be on Mac.
It's just not realistic at larger orgs (or IMO smaller ones too) to expect everyone to be on a Mac.
Then came Figma which solved this problem completely.
Yeah this. I love Macs but I mostly develop on my Linux Workstation so my company’s been using Figma since March and I’d honestly forgotten about sketch
Are we just accepting that Sketch is “dead” now? Genuinely curious. I realize Figma has been doing great things, but wasn’t under the impression that Sketch is over.
I don't know if it's "dead" but I have known a bunch of teams that, within the past 18 months, all switched from Sketch to Figma, and I certainly don't know anyone that's switched the other direction, soooo...
That said, these were all website and mobile app design teams, and another commenter mentioned that Sketch is better for print design. Still, have to imagine that print is a shrinking part of the overall marketplace.
All I know is a few (2 or 3) years ago I constantly got expense requests to cover sketch license renewals. It suddenly... stopped. We cover a Figma license but it never seems much.
We had at least 4 people in the team that ran a (poorly performing, annoying) VM with OSX just for sketch.
Sketch has had an integrated cloud sharing feature for awhile. You click two buttons in the app, and you have a shareable, comment-able page or prototype.
Figma’s first-mover advantage is significant, though.
Am I the only one who doesn't think Apple have much interest in supporting classic MacOS apps in the future?
Back in the day we used to judge the viability of Apples new techon if the Adobe suite was using them. This was a big deal during the Classic to OS X switch and the PPC to Intel switch.
I'm convinced Apple sees the future of Macs as running iPad apps, Photoshop and Illustrator are already there. Just how many other classic Mac apps do you think Apple consider critical? I think I can name 8.
I haven't really been too worried about that. They're free to build apps that are simpler to use, but the technology and frameworks behind it still need to be in place. As long as Apple themselves need to build e.g. Xcode, they need to be focusing on allowing developers to build macOS apps.
Figma is not a viable alternative if you're anything but a digital designer.
There are still print designers, packaging designers, exhibit designers, illustrators, the list goes on. I don’t see Sketch as dead, if anything it’s been getting a lot of cool new features over the past months.
Sketch isn't a print design tool, that is all still very locked up in Adobe with Affinity being the only real competitor. Not sure why it's being brought up in this context.
This is just one single-topic blog post on the Sketch blog. It is not a complete argument for using Sketch. It does present a complete overview of why someone would benefit from a native Mac app.
I don’t know what the bandwagon is doing, other than that I’m aware that Figma is also popular, but clearly cloud software has been contending with native for some time, each with their own advantages, and so it’s not surprising or concerning that software vendors of both software platform types would market the advantages of their chosen platform.
I care about it, and if the software was available to buy I would pay a premium for it as I’ve done before. That’s why I landed on the Mac platform. In the “bad” old days, the only major developers were Mac die hards, and very little of the platform felt foreign or unconventional. Now, the only thing keeping me on the Mac platform is muscle memory and a few lucky (hardware) strikes.
Meh, "design is a team sport" - great, everyone gets to jump in and play decorator and backseat drive. There are a lot of people with knives, but that doesn't make them a brain surgeon.
My design team and myself will take the sanctity of a native app to create quality work any day versus a "design" free for all in the browser with everyone playing decorator.
Except teams benefits from Figma far more than on sketch. Design systems, plugins, multiplayer for holding critique/retros/planning, version control, etc put Figma far ahead of Sketch.
I manage a design team and there’s no way in hell we would go back to Sketch.
To even think that having a “native” app has any bearing isn’t accurate at all. Sketch is so slow compared to Figma. You aren’t using multiplayer everyday but when you do need it, there’s nothing like it.
Adobe XD does all these things and has Miro integration for seamless collaboration and works in windows and Mac. Any reason why I would use Figma instead?
I think Adobe's business strategy is a compelling reason.
Knowing that they had a monopoly on creative software, they raised the prices to the point of completely locking out a significant portion of their userbase.
Definitely agree these sort of tools only help you if you have a functioning team, but this goes across everything. Had a manager come close to what I would consider bullying in my Google Docs before, would have been a complete nightmare using Figma with him, I would have outright refused to use it.
But if your team itself is functioning well and has respect for each others input it works well.
First, to say Design is sport is stupid beyond comprehension, second, implementation and optimisation are not design. Decorate your apps and be happy, but please stop with this nonsense. Every design project has a starting concept, initial design idea generated from one person - the designer.
One. Not team.
>> First, to say Design is sport is stupid beyond comprehension
Agree to disagree (without calling it stupid beyond comprehension). Design is so much more than final UI. It's the whole experience, how it works and how it's distributed. And that involves a lot of stakeholders, not just one designer.
So why buy Herman Miller design, or Ive design. Implementation can include lot of stakeholders, and again this is not sport in any meaning. Definition of sport: An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.
A lot of Mac users do. We chose the platform because of it, among other things.
I hate that WhatsApp, Skype and other crap Electron apps that I’m forced to use because of other people can’t do simple things like propor multi language spell checking that macOS has had since day one and that every other app gets for free.
I think the killer feature of macs with Apple Silicon is that the iPad versions of Slack and Discord would "just work" and people wouldn't have to deal with Electron crap anymore.
Discord is made out of React native I think. The performance is incredible most of the times. Sometimes it goes crazy and uses 100% CPU for a long time as if there's a while loop somewhere.
And with Apple Silicon, Im not sure that the restriction right now is architecture. Swift supports both x86 and ARM right? The problem is that the interactions are different in the desktop OS and simply recompiling or running it on desktop would not be a great experience.
Apple Silicon macs can run iOS/iPadOS binaries natively, no recompilation and no Catalyst needed. I think the experience of iPad apps will be just fine.
I’ll believe the story that these will be any good when Catalyst apps will start behaving like native apps. If developers can’t bother making a native experience with frameworks that are meant to do this, I don’t think they will with an even simpler paradigm.
My canary in the coal mine: Apple’s own SF Symbols.
No. But a native iOS version will be even less (aka not at all) optimised for macOS than a catalyst app. My point is that devs using catalyst don’t respect any of the macOS idiosyncrasies so why would they when they write iOS apps?
An Electron app would still be better than a iOS version optimised for a big thumb.
I consider the built in spell check to be of the greatest features of MacOS and I'm furious when apps either change the way their inputs work so you lose the feature or even worse add their own dumbed down bespoke solution in it's place.
Worth noting Sketch broke spell check many versions back around the time I stopped using it.
I think this is a good example of the HN bubble which is one of the only places where "native macOS app" means anything to anybody. At least something more than "oh, I need to have a Macbook for that?"
My girlfriend is a UX professional that does most of her work in Sketch. She doesn't care about macOS beyond the fact that it's required by the tools she has to use.
I impulse-built an overpowered Windows machine earlier this year and tried to pawn it off on her, but she didn't even want it because it doesn't run Sketch. She's stuck on a Macbook.
Some people are replying to you saying there are these great benefits to being macOS native, but they really pale in comparison to having to learn something as complex as Sketch. A few familiar component paradigms don't really put a dent in the learning curve, or it's at least vastly overstated. I'd liken Sketch more to Photoshop in the sense that some native components aren't going to make the hard stuff easier.
One practical downside of being macOS-only is that it makes those hard fought Sketch skills less portable and any business that uses Sketch in their pipeline now has a hard platform requirement. Maybe they'll choose something else like Figma. That's something much more tangible to a Sketch professional.
Even VS Code's popularity among developers (the one group presumably sensitive to "native" vs not) suggests how little weight "native" carries with most people. When it's time to get work done, turns out there are more important considerations.
I think you're right, hard to imagine it's a hill worth dying on.
Sounds like she came up with a good reason to decline the offer under the duress of someone comparing specs as a selling point. If I did the same with my GF who just uses the web and some standard apps, she'd be like "no, why would I want that giant monolithic rgb heat generator that I can't take anywhere?". Some people buy nacs because that's what the applications run on, or it's required for school, but a hell of a lot of people just like macs.
Well. Being in a corporate job (agency I work for got bought some years back and we need to have compliance with the corp requirements) I can say that my Mac and my Win devices have the same level of spyware. While at least on Windows every program (as far as I am aware) follows firewall rules without circumvention. Not so on a Mac were Apple tools like the store circumvent the firewall rules I set up [1].
I see the same behavior on an external display connected MacBook with Safari. Split second day mode before dark mode.
Same for videos from YouTube in Safari when they go full screen.
I use Windows 10 for work and Mac OS for personal use and both have their share of quirkiness and bugs. Mac OS is way more mouse based UI and interestingly no one complains about it.
Personally, I heavily rely on gesture-based navigation on MacBooks. An equivalent trackpad for Windows laptops is nowhere to be found. It's a huge selling point for me, and it's a shame that there's little-to-no competition in that regard.
I agree. When I started my current job 6 years ago I choose the Mac because of the terminal. Then, when I could get the new Macbook Pro I stayed for Keynote (imho just the best tool for presentations) and Sketch (as an analyst I sometimes need to create dashboard mock-ups). Now I use Figma exclusively for that as I also use a Windows machine and sometimes a Linux one. Well Figma is usable on all of them and were it not for Keynote I would ditch the Mac totally.
In my agency Mac is there because of tradition from developers and designers. More and more developers jump ship to better hardware and use Windows with WLS2 or Linux. Designers tend to stay with the Mac even if they switch to Figma. Some years back it was PS -> Sketch. Now it is Sketch-> Figma massively for a year or so.
Without intending to criticize your relationship to your girlfriend, I think your experience presents a lesson in client-provider relations. It’s absolutely vital that you understand your client’s needs before running off and building them a solution they may reject out of hand.
An overpowered Windows machine is best suited for gaming, not design work. Vector graphics tools like Sketch work fine on a MacBook. They don’t need a desktop grade CPU with tons of RAM and a powerful video card.
Her aging Macbook Pro definitely struggles with the load. So much that she's asked me for help to figure out what's wrong. But a large Sketch project, like a large Photoshop project, is just resource intensive.
An overpowered machine would definitely be welcome. My point was to emphasize how a crossplatform app would let her take advantage of the opportunity (a new computer I built for one game that I'm giving away) where a native app does very little for her.
I use a Macbook myself and encountered the same thing on the new Windows machine. Every application that was Mac-only was just downside. It made me extra motivated to finished shifting my work environment to crossplat apps like VSCode. And CLI tools that worked well in WSL2.
Totally agreed. And, although the site is definitely cool, isn't it kind of ironic? It's a paen to native-only Mac apps back in the System 9 days, when the developer experience and design language was totally different. Macs don't even look, or work, like this anymore.
I think it's great that this is what they want to focus on, but it's not very convincing as a business decision in general -- it feels like doubling down on the past.
As someone fortunate enough to wfh, works in both dev and ux, and uses Windows and Ubuntu, I couldn't agree more.
Nearly want to shoot myself every time I'm told, "Hey, I'm sending over the Sketch file" or "sigh An Illustrator again? I wish you had a mac w/ Sketch when you made these wires".
I can't blame the people who say that, but god damn just release a windows version. There's Lunacy for windows, but it's buggy as hell.
Call me old fashion, but I'm sticking to Illustrator for the time being
I think that the pandemic really accelerated this. Our team uses Sketch, but we're quickly coming up on a project that'll involve a lot of collaboration, and Sketch simply won't be able to handle it. If we were in person, that would be different, but we aren't, and so I'm trying to get us Figma licenses.
Users may (or may not!) say that they don't care about native apps... but they absolutely notice and care about whether the app is slow and awkward. Native apps are much nicer to use than the lowest-common-denominator garbage you get otherwise.
Users care all else being equal, but the point of this thread is that Sketch is not equal to Figma and being native isn't enough to overcome the difference.
I think it's an oversimplification to say that Blackberry went bankrupt because they decided to stick to keyboard. They could've innovated while keeping the keyboard.
Hence why Visual Studio Code destroyed the editor world. As an editor it was nothing special at all; at that time it was just intellisense that blew it up IMO. People were willing to eat non-native solely for intellisense.
By now VSC has developed a moat with their incredible velocity for delivering new features, like voice chat, shared sessions, git + docker + debugger integration, etc.
By the time Nova came out they looked incredibly behind. The front page advertising their app looks cluttered with catch-up features.
Separate point, but I absolutely loathe on-screen keyboards. They reduce my phone typing speed to literally 5% of what it used to be on my old Nokia or Blackberry.
Case in point - this comment would have taken me no more than 20 seconds to type, compared with over a minute on this ridiculous iPhone keyboard that gets every third or fourth letter wrong, and just randomly decides to capitalise words in the middle of a sentence.
I’ve been gifted my last few phones, but the next one I buy, I will seriously consider one with a hardware keyboard.
What a baffling stand. "Pride" in only serving the customer base with the expensive machines? I truly hope Figma eats your lunch. Say no to gate-keeping.
I've used Sketch for years but haven't renewed my license which expired in August. I still like it to create some very quick mockups (less than an hour). But Figma is the go-to UI tool now, especially for teams, but even for a single designer like me. Their development pace is insane. They just released component variants: https://twitter.com/MaxBrunel/status/1320768394153570305
Weirdly enough, in terms of performance, the Figma Electron app feels slower to me than the Figma web app (in Chrome). Go figure. But it still feels just as quick as Sketch, so performance is not a criteria for choosing Sketch over Figma. I made the full switch only recently but it's a no-brainer. Plus, it's free.
I wouldn't be proud to keep developing on Apple's platforms considering they're an utter pain these days to continue to support as well as them being outwardly hostile.
I wouldn't bank my company's existence on a another company that could not care less if I existed. Much less would I praise and bend over backwards to promote someone else's products other than my own in my marketing materials like this.
Figma is eating them brutally. I'm a designer and everyone I know (and their companies) are moving away from Sketch.
Figma understood that the breakthrough of this market is to create a platform, not a tool. Building a native app is not going to help you win this market. That's for sure.
Can confirm, we've been using Sketch since very early days, long before it was popular, and every single designer we have knows it like the back of their hand. We made the switch last year to Figma (just to test), and now it's 100% Figma.
Sketch is a great individual tool, but Figma is a great organizational tool.
For Sketch to write this means they don't plan on competing with Figma, I assume because it would likely put them behind multiple years in R&D.
Seconded. We work closely with a design firm for our products, them and us, we've slowly all migrated to Figma to a point where all our design assets, branding assets, mockups are on Figma. Ironically being Mac only is one of the reason Sketch is losing against Figma. There was a gap in cross-platform collaborative design tools, Figma made the move, and did so with amazing UX. Sketch was, what I'd say, lazy when Figma was at it.
Adobe XD does everything Figma does from what I can tell and is cross platform and you can use Miro to get seamless collaboration via the web to share your Art boards. What is Figma's killer features?
By now, I'd treat Apple-exclusive app developers for Stockholm syndrome.
I used to build a Mac-only native app for real-time audio processing, which was great for battery life, snappy performance and had no latency. But the work that Apple pushed on me just to keep things running okay-ish across OS releases was too much to bear compared with the meager revenue of only serving 10% of the addressable market.
By now, my app is using a cross-platform C++ framework so that I can compile the same code for Windows, Linux and Mac. Windows and surprisingly Linux pay for development of new features, while Mac is more of a prestigious afterthought. Needless to say, I'm not using native Apple frameworks anymore and battery life on OS X has suffered. But finally, the same C++ code will compile nicely across OS X versions, the app is profitable, and I'm not stressed by every WWDC anymore.
And then when Epic showed me what I had feared all along - namely that Apple is happy to sacrifice their loyal developers in the name of profits - I was just glad that I had taken the jump off Apple-specific development tools early enough.
I was with you until you mentioned Epic. What Epic did was a violation of a contract in a way it knew would bring about a confrontation. The judge hearing the case agreed that it was purely self-inflicted pain by Epic.
To be clear, many App Store rules seem arbitrary and ill defined (and enforced), but Epic is not the one to support here for what it did.
I agree that Epic is not innocent here. But what I worried about was Apple's reaction to them. Kicking Epic out is OK, but when they decided to use Epic's Unreal Engine customers as leverage by threatening to prevent future security updates of the engine, that was a clear sign that the current Apple management does not value the indie studios that build the apps.
Most of the product moves now are just BOM reductions or ways to milk more service revenue. Calling it now, the Native Mac OS App this blog post champions won't exist in 10 years. Apple will kill it because iPads and iPhones outnumber Macs, the norm for Apple now is to get a cut of software sales and the sort of Native app Sketch represents doesn't get them that cut.
The future of MacOS is it's the place you go to multitask "the iPad apps you know and love". This will be a bitter pill for myself and everyone here to swallow but if you believe I'm wrong then what you actually believe is that Tim Cook understands the value of an open operating system enough to justify not getting a cut on all those software sales, do you truly believe that?
Why is what I'm proposing doom? The iPad is a more popular and modern platform than MacOS, MacOs users should be happy they now get to take advantage of that beloved ecosystem. (Well that's what the PR will say anyway)
Think you're missing the point what I'm making and passing it off as just general Apple negativity.
Spatial Audio Designer + it's virtual sound card. As heard in Red Tails by Lucasfilm, for example. Or the Expendables 3 bluray.
LAWO hardware mixing desks are Linux based, so the broadcast world demands Linux tools.
But the whole thing started out as an Apple exclusive app to be used together with Pro Tools. Ironically, Pro Tools has also had lots of problems with new macOS releases, so when their Windows presence grew, we observed our most important customers jumping ship and decided to follow them.
The C++ framework is JUCE. I'm a big fan of its visual editor and how easily you can extend that to support your own GUI components.
As far as I know, we're the only ones offering this. Both on Windows and on Mac. We used to have healthy profits on Mac before the problems started. Then, as our customers moved from Mac to Windows, so did our revenue.
OT: But their 8bit graphics theme (which are really not 8-bit, I know...) is so much the wrong message for a product like Sketch that it was a net loss for me.
Graphics are important, and styles like that are great for games, but the message they give me is: "The fun doesn't come from the graphics"
I don't get it. Reading through their reasons to love native I kept thinking, "I don't use that feature".
Finder? A file browser exists in every OS and browsers support browsing file systems well. I have so many thousands of files at this point, using a file browser isn't an advantage to me.
Time Machine? I've never used it because my thousands of files have been stored in a cloud sync app for a decade and I don't think about backups anymore.
Keyboard shortcuts? Well, maybe I should do more of this, but I don't create many of my own. I prefer the command line, actually.
Drag toolbar items around? I'd rather learn their original locations so I don't have to customize everytime I install something.
I'll stop there. I actually enjoy some native apps but even those I typically wish they weren't native. What if I want to run them on my Chromebook for a bit? What if I decide I can't drop the money on a Mac anymore and go for Linux? What if I don't like how the ecosystem locks me in going forward? Today I love my Mac, but I'm not sure I'll still love it tomorrow. Web based and cross platform software gives me more choice.
> Time Machine? I've never used it because my thousands of files have been stored in a cloud sync app for a decade and I don't think about backups anymore.
I’m basing the following purely on your words in this comment. Does your cloud sync app support syncing or syncing with backups, where file version history exists for a long duration and files are stored (even the locally deleted ones) till it runs out of space (and initiates cleanup at that point)? If yes, that may be ok (though still not comparable to a local backup that could be a lot faster depending on the need). If not, then it’s nowhere close to what Time Machine offers (or what a backup application like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner with history support offers).
Platform exclusivity should be discouraged, not praised. If I can't use the software then their supposed benefits of being native don't do me much good.
I think one the issues here was that sketch started as a very small indie mac app. In the case of one or two developers working on a niche product, exclusivity is forgivable. The problem is that sketch got way too popular, way too big and took investment and are now expected to compete with a competitor like figma.
Which is fair enough, my point is I think it was a mistake for Sketch to even put itself in the same ballpark as Figma and raise investment. It could have stayed as a niche tool and likely supported a small team.
One thing I think people aren't pointing out is how much Figma seems to have done [1] to make the web platform work for them in the way Sketch is describing the Mac App. It almost seems like a technical moat of sorts. Achieving the ridiculous snappiness Figma in browsers is certainly non-trivial.
Every single day I’m finding myself using more and more Figma over my standard workflow tools like Photoshop and Illustrator...I just absolutely love how fast and snappy it is.
I had a recent experience with autodesk that shows that free tiers can disappear or be neutered after you've invested significant time and energy into them.
If you just owned that version of the software it would work forever instead you are at the mercy of the platform forever.
It's not just free tiers. Imagine the comments here in a decades time when Figma goes full Adobe and starts to squeeze every last drop of blood out of their customer base.
I don't use sketch, so I don't know anything about it. It's mac only and while i have an ipad pro and an iphone, I don't own a mac and dont want one, and thats a mac only app.
I'm not sure why sketch would have the restrictions they have except that forever supporting old formats might be more expensive than they could justify.
I am pro and don't use cloud software in production, actually this is a clause in contract for my clients. They care about quality not trendiness. Downvotes on your comment are telling me that this is the new JS topic. Oh no.... :)
I think there are plenty of things to knock cloud based SaaS tools for but quality is a weird one - there are plenty of high quality cloud based solutions that can deliver high quality outputs.
Sorry, my english is not polished enough to express my point of view properly. I will try again. When I talk about quality it is in context applied to servicing my clients. In context of UX/UI and graphical design. When using a traditionally licensed software I own a tool. I can do my professional work with this tool and make a profit. New features add extra functionality and if I have a business case for this new functionality I can invest. But in most of use cases I can do my work with previous version with base functionality. Life cycle of graphic software must be long. Thats why I use Affinty software for design and avoid Adobe products. I know what my ROI is. My software is not bloated with background web services and notifications.
Agree, Figma is definitely slower, but Sketch has issues too when there are too many objects in the workspace. I think if Sketch made their performance 10x better, then I'd agree that native apps are better, but it's more like a 1.2x than a 10x.
Am I the only one that finds figma a little complicated to use (I mean, I didn't find it intuitive enough). But then again designing is not my job, I'm just a developer who thought of trying it after so many people praised it.
Figma user here, I wouldn't call it snappy. Feels just about the same as any other design tool I've used in the past (as a dev, consumer -- not the designer).
figma is pretty freaken amazing, and it works outside of macs. So overall there is nothing but upsides to it. Collaboration is amazing too. Just... No down sides.
Figma is significantly more expensive than Sketch, e.g. for individuals: $144/year vs ($99 for first year + $79 for next years), and that's if you choose to upgrade Sketch every year, which you don't need to.
Figma have a free plan which works perfectly fine for my purposes (implementing designs given to me by designers, and very occasionally making my own).
I could switch to Figma from Sketch very easily because I could upload my Sketch files in Figma and Figma could deconstruct them into layers and elements with even layer names intact!
Vice versa? No.
Even Photoshop files .PSD are readable in many other photo editing apps.
They have an API using which you get a json representation of your files. That is the same as sketch (whose file format is essentially zipped json files).
the thing with web apps is - it's slow, but it is the Java's original goal from the 90s "write once, run everywhere" actually realized. Plus, built-in collaborativeness and automatic updates. And, easier to get developers.
Native is nice, native is fast, and it will have its place (compare how bad is Google Meet compared to Zoom with respect to CPU/RAM), but web is becoming "good enough".
Interesting. I'm curious what machine spec you're on. I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on an dell laptop (XPS 7590 with an i9 processor, 32gb ram, discrete Nvidia graphics card).
I see my processor spin up to 90% utilization whenever I do a zoom call.
I moved my company away from Sketch to Figma and one of the big differentiators was that folks who don't use macOS on our team can't use sketch, at all.
One thing I really appreciate about Sketch over Figma for my solo projects is that it’s offline-first. Call me old fashioned but I don’t want my designs or the app I use to design to be so strongly tethered to the web.
You can't pay for it once if you use it as a team because a file made on the latest version of the app can't be opened in older versions so all it takes is one person on your team to be out of sync with versions and you need to pay.
It's a generous subscription, but it's still basically a subscription once you're not working in a silo.
As a native desktop app developer, I feel like on the contrary it's very important to insulate from most of the OS APIs as users have come to expect availability on whatever desktop platform they are using. The Discord app has great UX and UI, arguably better than most native app and is exactly the same across all desktop OSes. "Apple tried and tested frameworks", what does that even means. It's not like other OSes come with buggy APIs.
I want the apps on my machine to have standard conventions for that platform, not alien conventions.
Having a standard UX across platforms optimized for the uncommon case. The more common case is that the user sticks to one platform so learning an astandard set of conventions is a barrier.
Dear Sketch developers, I love your app but will not renew the license, not because Figma. We use Affinity at the office. No. Collaborative design is a trend and it will pass in a mess that will be a result of mediocrity and lack of character. My problem is that you cannot see the Writing on the wall ahead, Apple will bring you down, they do not care, they are service sellers. If you want your software to live long and serve your customers fairly, its time to invest in multi-platform development, and if you want market advantage make Linux your primary choice.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadAt least, with Sketch/macOS the code is executed on the device you can control (to a degree).
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
With locally running app you control when and where the app works, and you have way more options when developer introduces some changes that don't fit you.
Maybe you were trying to say that you can't open new sketch files because your version of macOS doesn't support latest versions of Sketch? That is, indeed, a problem. However, if you work only with internal files, you can simply abstain from upgrading to new version and keep working on the version that works for you. Moreover, Sketch licences do not 'expire', you simply can't receive updates any longer. So you can still work with your files as long as you need, not relying on someone else's actions.
By paying for any tool you are strengthening its position and philosophy, whether you care about it or not.
The reason MS Office struggles with this is that rebuilding an app that wasn't originally supposed to work in such mode is way harder than building from scratch, and they probably don't really need it that much to push themselves in such an adventure.
As a designer, I’d much rather collaborate via the Git-like system of Abstract, committing changes and merging pull requests than have things happening elsewhere in the file I’m working on with no versioning or notification.
Real-time collaboration has never been in demand among developers, has it?
VSCode's liveshare feature is getting very close though and it does feel great to attack a challenge together from time to time.
I do not miss Sketch one bit.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24899970
People uses Macs because they want to use Macs and software that takes advantage of the reliability and consistency of that ecosystem.
probably true ~4-5 years ago, but not so much today. Catalina broke a lot of apps (due to SIP?). Big Sur is likely to break even more existing apps. In one case, it was seen that Apple apps do not obey the same rules that third party developers must abide by (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816).
I use a mbp at this point because it's not Windows.
However, this is to be expected from organisations that is powered by one charismatic leader.
The only thing I really, really miss is OmniGraffle.
Precisely the same. I used to be a big fan of the Apple ecosystem. When Jobs said the customer doesn't know what they need, he was usually right... he of course was a gifted visionary. Apple has continued with the same mindset but without the gifted visionary, in some cases with comical decisions e.g., keyboard, touchbar, soldering SSD to logic boards with high failure rates).
Can't we just rustle up a few obscenely rich billionaires to donate a hundred million to develop an OS with a top priority of quality and usability rather than lock in.
ehhh. I think if you did some analytics of “apps Mac users use” an absolute ton would be “a web browser and very little else”. I can think of very few truly native Mac apps I depend upon and that keep me on the platform.
What does keep me on Macs is that every now and then I need to compile an iOS app. Apple give me no choice. Aside from that I’d say a lot of developers choose Macs because they’re the least worst POSIX platform, not because Mac native apps are a shining beacon on a hill.
Should I feel ashamed or something for saying yes? I hear all the bitching about how Electron is bloated, but I run Slack and VS Code all day and never have resource issues on my MBP.
The solution we settled on is to run an android emulator and run slack and spotify in that. This restricts the usage to 500Mb and his PC is able to breathe a bit now
When I open Mimestream (a new native gmail app), I see my messages in an instant.
That’s enough for me to dislike Slack.
As a longtime Mac user, I really wish that Apple would make it possible to compile iOS apps on iPad. Not for myself, but for the developers who are only on the Mac for iOS development. I don't think it does anyone any good to force them to be in a place where they don't want to be. I have no ill will against iOS developers, but I also don't want them to transform the Mac into something non-Mac. Mac has always been a "niche" platform, and that's fine! Let the users who are here voluntarily stay, and let the users who are here only "by force" go to a platform that suits their needs better, perhaps iPad. If Xcode for iPad can facilitate that, I'm all in favor.
I have been getting by using a family member's machine to build iOS apps on, but if I were just on Mac to build iOS apps every now and then, I'd be complaining about Mac all day online honestly.
It's just not my cup of tea. Like water and oil together, but I'm sure for some people it's everything they want in a computer
My opinion is that Google's UX is now best in class -- things like Google Docs that are just nearing perfection that everyone seems to have no trouble with. Youtube would be another example of a highly effective UI.
I do think native is quite overrated :)
They are obviously trying - I keep seeing things like workspaces and pinning docs that are obviously experiments in trying to fix it. But not there yet!
I do agree that the Google Suite of tools are very usable though.
Coming mostly from a Windows desktop background, I only started developing for Apple devices late on. Holy shit, I can’t believe people have been putting themselves through that horrible experience for the better part of two decades.
Having said that I despair at what Windows has become.
I love that metaphor!
The main issue I have with Xcode, is that it is buggy as hell. I was hoping Xcode 12 would address this, but it’s just as bad as its predecessors.
I'm completely baffled by this statement. The Google Docs UI hasn't changed since it was released ten years ago and it's just an imitation of Microsoft Word from the mid-nineties. What is good or special about it?
The simplicity of the collaboration features was a huge game changer at the time, and it's still best-in-class and very easy.
Because it doesn't do much. I'm quite frustrated by the lack of features for advanced users.
I wouldn't die on that hill.
They may not put it in those terms, but they do. They can tell when an app feels 'weird' or slow (be it actually slow or just higher latency). That depends a lot on the user base for the specific app in question. The more 'casual' the user base, the less it matters.
Being native also allows you to get functionality for free that other users may depend on. In OSX it translates to things like scripts, or more often, assistive devices, like screen readers.
Just going to leave this here https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
https://nova.app
Ironically Jetbrains IDEs are Java, using Java Swing for the UI[1]! This is even less native than VS.Code where at least native widgets are used.
I guess this shows how much our impressions are formed by expectations!
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/12311981/280795
Simple experimental proof: resize the window to be very small, and open a menu. The menu can't go outside the bounds of the window.
On my laptop (6 core 3,9GHz 32GB RAM and NVME) VS Code is fast and responsive, still wastes lots of RAM though. Jetbrains tools meanwhile were way more laggy on the same setup.
And I dream the day that React Native for Windows/Mac team at Microsoft manages to force a VSCode rewrite.
There is absolutely no reason not to be responsive, low on memory and as powerful as a native app.
[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...
I won’t go into why (as everyone here seems to be trying to convince everyone else, who aren’t really listening, anyway. I’m not really looking to change my viewpoint).
Figma is cool. I’m working with a designer, now, and we’ll see how it goes. Not sure I’d really say it was a direct Sketch competitor, though. I think Adobe Illustrator is Sketch’s biggest competitor, and that says a lot about Sketch.
On the Mac, I also like to use tooltips, applying the same string as voiceover.
[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/ambiamara/blob/bbb1d98... (Note, also, that these voiceover strings have been localized in French, German, and Spanish).
As someone who's worked on a lot of collaborative technology, I find it weird how most of the interest in collaborative editing is confined to the web. As I understand it, Figma's internal collaborative engine is written in C++ anyway.
A primary thing Figma understood better than pretty much anyone else is how collaboration among different teams (not just design) works in product development.
Collaboration is also much more useful when you're not limited to only working with people using the same OS. Multi-platform distribution is built into web apps, but it takes a lot more effort to create good native apps on several platforms.
Also, of course, no need to install anything on the web, which is important for frictionless collaboration.
---
It's no surprise that both desktop and mobile OS-s are very much not optimized for cross platform development. It's a feature (for owners of those OS-s), not a bug.
I love Sketch but it's closer to Illustrator or XD (at least, that's how I use it) than Figma. If they want to throw shade it should be at Adobe, since their interface is just better and app is faster/smaller/doesn't run six background daemons.
On a different note, I've heard multiple pitches where startups position themselves as "Figma for X" but never "Sketch for X." Figma is a platform that is building out into different markets, Sketch has much smaller applicability.
It's just not realistic at larger orgs (or IMO smaller ones too) to expect everyone to be on a Mac.
Then came Figma which solved this problem completely.
Are we just accepting that Sketch is “dead” now? Genuinely curious. I realize Figma has been doing great things, but wasn’t under the impression that Sketch is over.
That said, these were all website and mobile app design teams, and another commenter mentioned that Sketch is better for print design. Still, have to imagine that print is a shrinking part of the overall marketplace.
We had at least 4 people in the team that ran a (poorly performing, annoying) VM with OSX just for sketch.
Figma’s first-mover advantage is significant, though.
Back in the day we used to judge the viability of Apples new techon if the Adobe suite was using them. This was a big deal during the Classic to OS X switch and the PPC to Intel switch.
I'm convinced Apple sees the future of Macs as running iPad apps, Photoshop and Illustrator are already there. Just how many other classic Mac apps do you think Apple consider critical? I think I can name 8.
There are still print designers, packaging designers, exhibit designers, illustrators, the list goes on. I don’t see Sketch as dead, if anything it’s been getting a lot of cool new features over the past months.
I don’t know what the bandwagon is doing, other than that I’m aware that Figma is also popular, but clearly cloud software has been contending with native for some time, each with their own advantages, and so it’s not surprising or concerning that software vendors of both software platform types would market the advantages of their chosen platform.
My design team and myself will take the sanctity of a native app to create quality work any day versus a "design" free for all in the browser with everyone playing decorator.
I manage a design team and there’s no way in hell we would go back to Sketch.
To even think that having a “native” app has any bearing isn’t accurate at all. Sketch is so slow compared to Figma. You aren’t using multiplayer everyday but when you do need it, there’s nothing like it.
Knowing that they had a monopoly on creative software, they raised the prices to the point of completely locking out a significant portion of their userbase.
If they could, they would do the same to XD.
Seeing you write this, a doubt creeps that you ever used Sketch.
But if your team itself is functioning well and has respect for each others input it works well.
Agree to disagree (without calling it stupid beyond comprehension). Design is so much more than final UI. It's the whole experience, how it works and how it's distributed. And that involves a lot of stakeholders, not just one designer.
I hate that WhatsApp, Skype and other crap Electron apps that I’m forced to use because of other people can’t do simple things like propor multi language spell checking that macOS has had since day one and that every other app gets for free.
And with Apple Silicon, Im not sure that the restriction right now is architecture. Swift supports both x86 and ARM right? The problem is that the interactions are different in the desktop OS and simply recompiling or running it on desktop would not be a great experience.
My canary in the coal mine: Apple’s own SF Symbols.
intuitively, it would seem apples answer is to make mac apps behave/look like ipad/catalyst appe (e.g big sur's uo redesign)
An Electron app would still be better than a iOS version optimised for a big thumb.
But Chrome is a klackety resource hog compared to Safari.
Web versions of native apps always feel clunky in comparison and they're almost always missing features, like accessibility.
Please substantiate this claim. To me, the opposite is true.
lol
Worth noting Sketch broke spell check many versions back around the time I stopped using it.
My girlfriend is a UX professional that does most of her work in Sketch. She doesn't care about macOS beyond the fact that it's required by the tools she has to use.
I impulse-built an overpowered Windows machine earlier this year and tried to pawn it off on her, but she didn't even want it because it doesn't run Sketch. She's stuck on a Macbook.
Some people are replying to you saying there are these great benefits to being macOS native, but they really pale in comparison to having to learn something as complex as Sketch. A few familiar component paradigms don't really put a dent in the learning curve, or it's at least vastly overstated. I'd liken Sketch more to Photoshop in the sense that some native components aren't going to make the hard stuff easier.
One practical downside of being macOS-only is that it makes those hard fought Sketch skills less portable and any business that uses Sketch in their pipeline now has a hard platform requirement. Maybe they'll choose something else like Figma. That's something much more tangible to a Sketch professional.
Even VS Code's popularity among developers (the one group presumably sensitive to "native" vs not) suggests how little weight "native" carries with most people. When it's time to get work done, turns out there are more important considerations.
I think you're right, hard to imagine it's a hill worth dying on.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816
So I believe both platforms are problematic. Does Windows try to do way more data collection by default? Sadly yes. Is Mac without fault? Sadly no.
Same for videos from YouTube in Safari when they go full screen.
I use Windows 10 for work and Mac OS for personal use and both have their share of quirkiness and bugs. Mac OS is way more mouse based UI and interestingly no one complains about it.
Just before people finally realized how stupid inverse color schemes are, Microsoft got rid of the whole thing.
In my agency Mac is there because of tradition from developers and designers. More and more developers jump ship to better hardware and use Windows with WLS2 or Linux. Designers tend to stay with the Mac even if they switch to Figma. Some years back it was PS -> Sketch. Now it is Sketch-> Figma massively for a year or so.
An overpowered Windows machine is best suited for gaming, not design work. Vector graphics tools like Sketch work fine on a MacBook. They don’t need a desktop grade CPU with tons of RAM and a powerful video card.
An overpowered machine would definitely be welcome. My point was to emphasize how a crossplatform app would let her take advantage of the opportunity (a new computer I built for one game that I'm giving away) where a native app does very little for her.
I use a Macbook myself and encountered the same thing on the new Windows machine. Every application that was Mac-only was just downside. It made me extra motivated to finished shifting my work environment to crossplat apps like VSCode. And CLI tools that worked well in WSL2.
I think it's great that this is what they want to focus on, but it's not very convincing as a business decision in general -- it feels like doubling down on the past.
Nearly want to shoot myself every time I'm told, "Hey, I'm sending over the Sketch file" or "sigh An Illustrator again? I wish you had a mac w/ Sketch when you made these wires".
I can't blame the people who say that, but god damn just release a windows version. There's Lunacy for windows, but it's buggy as hell.
Call me old fashion, but I'm sticking to Illustrator for the time being
I do absolutely agree that native apps are a much better experience. I prefer Paw over postman every time for this reason too.
However creating a Sketch plugin which downloads a simple JSON was an absolute nightmare.
When you develop with native you get performance and UI for free. When you develop with the web you get.. the web.
This is also why people fundamentally disagree on whether one or the other is good: they have different outcomes that fit different needs.
Obviously if collaboration is needed, being in web technology helps a lot since you're already inside a communication platform.
If your need is "single person focus" then that brings no value.
Users don’t care about native or not , they care only about innovation.
By now VSC has developed a moat with their incredible velocity for delivering new features, like voice chat, shared sessions, git + docker + debugger integration, etc.
By the time Nova came out they looked incredibly behind. The front page advertising their app looks cluttered with catch-up features.
That is what nova couldn’t compete with.
3 years later they released VS Code Alpha.
They spent millions on it.
Teams in enterprise don’t have the freedom to innovate the same way startups do.
5 people for something that could never see the light , even in a multi billion dollar , was very risky and lot of money.
Obviously it’s now 1000% recouped.
Case in point - this comment would have taken me no more than 20 seconds to type, compared with over a minute on this ridiculous iPhone keyboard that gets every third or fourth letter wrong, and just randomly decides to capitalise words in the middle of a sentence.
I’ve been gifted my last few phones, but the next one I buy, I will seriously consider one with a hardware keyboard.
Weirdly enough, in terms of performance, the Figma Electron app feels slower to me than the Figma web app (in Chrome). Go figure. But it still feels just as quick as Sketch, so performance is not a criteria for choosing Sketch over Figma. I made the full switch only recently but it's a no-brainer. Plus, it's free.
I wouldn't bank my company's existence on a another company that could not care less if I existed. Much less would I praise and bend over backwards to promote someone else's products other than my own in my marketing materials like this.
What a bizarre corporate decision.
Sketch is a great individual tool, but Figma is a great organizational tool.
For Sketch to write this means they don't plan on competing with Figma, I assume because it would likely put them behind multiple years in R&D.
It's frustrating sometime when you switch machines and software you've purchased for a machine is not available across multiple operating systems.
I used to build a Mac-only native app for real-time audio processing, which was great for battery life, snappy performance and had no latency. But the work that Apple pushed on me just to keep things running okay-ish across OS releases was too much to bear compared with the meager revenue of only serving 10% of the addressable market.
By now, my app is using a cross-platform C++ framework so that I can compile the same code for Windows, Linux and Mac. Windows and surprisingly Linux pay for development of new features, while Mac is more of a prestigious afterthought. Needless to say, I'm not using native Apple frameworks anymore and battery life on OS X has suffered. But finally, the same C++ code will compile nicely across OS X versions, the app is profitable, and I'm not stressed by every WWDC anymore.
And then when Epic showed me what I had feared all along - namely that Apple is happy to sacrifice their loyal developers in the name of profits - I was just glad that I had taken the jump off Apple-specific development tools early enough.
To be clear, many App Store rules seem arbitrary and ill defined (and enforced), but Epic is not the one to support here for what it did.
There are no product people left in charge at Apple. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
Most of the product moves now are just BOM reductions or ways to milk more service revenue. Calling it now, the Native Mac OS App this blog post champions won't exist in 10 years. Apple will kill it because iPads and iPhones outnumber Macs, the norm for Apple now is to get a cut of software sales and the sort of Native app Sketch represents doesn't get them that cut.
The future of MacOS is it's the place you go to multitask "the iPad apps you know and love". This will be a bitter pill for myself and everyone here to swallow but if you believe I'm wrong then what you actually believe is that Tim Cook understands the value of an open operating system enough to justify not getting a cut on all those software sales, do you truly believe that?
People have been predicting doom for Apple from various angles since the 1980s and they always end up having to eat their shoes:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=500
If anything, Apple Silicon Macs will usher in a new era of Apple exclusivity, and you'll move on to predicting doom for their Next Big Thing. :)
Think you're missing the point what I'm making and passing it off as just general Apple negativity.
Which app is that?
LAWO hardware mixing desks are Linux based, so the broadcast world demands Linux tools.
But the whole thing started out as an Apple exclusive app to be used together with Pro Tools. Ironically, Pro Tools has also had lots of problems with new macOS releases, so when their Windows presence grew, we observed our most important customers jumping ship and decided to follow them.
The C++ framework is JUCE. I'm a big fan of its visual editor and how easily you can extend that to support your own GUI components.
If users have other options, that might explain the difference in your revenue across platforms.
Graphics are important, and styles like that are great for games, but the message they give me is: "The fun doesn't come from the graphics"
Always be sure of the unconscious marketing
Finder? A file browser exists in every OS and browsers support browsing file systems well. I have so many thousands of files at this point, using a file browser isn't an advantage to me.
Time Machine? I've never used it because my thousands of files have been stored in a cloud sync app for a decade and I don't think about backups anymore.
Keyboard shortcuts? Well, maybe I should do more of this, but I don't create many of my own. I prefer the command line, actually.
Drag toolbar items around? I'd rather learn their original locations so I don't have to customize everytime I install something.
I'll stop there. I actually enjoy some native apps but even those I typically wish they weren't native. What if I want to run them on my Chromebook for a bit? What if I decide I can't drop the money on a Mac anymore and go for Linux? What if I don't like how the ecosystem locks me in going forward? Today I love my Mac, but I'm not sure I'll still love it tomorrow. Web based and cross platform software gives me more choice.
I’m basing the following purely on your words in this comment. Does your cloud sync app support syncing or syncing with backups, where file version history exists for a long duration and files are stored (even the locally deleted ones) till it runs out of space (and initiates cleanup at that point)? If yes, that may be ok (though still not comparable to a local backup that could be a lot faster depending on the need). If not, then it’s nowhere close to what Time Machine offers (or what a backup application like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner with history support offers).
I do like native apps and would prefer them all things being equal. But all things rarely are equal.
That’s why I use VSCode instead of Sublime. And Gmail instead of Apple Mail.
Instead of justifying why native apps are better they should really just explain why Sketch is better. None of the reasons they gave are compelling.
[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...
But I'm not a pro, don't have corporate to pay for my license, may only use a drawing, design, paint program occasionally.
If you just owned that version of the software it would work forever instead you are at the mercy of the platform forever.
Caveat emptor
Take a look at Sketch. You can use a file on future versions...but up to a point. If you hit that limit, you will have to buy the upgrade.
I'm not sure why sketch would have the restrictions they have except that forever supporting old formats might be more expensive than they could justify.
Figma is significantly more expensive than Sketch, e.g. for individuals: $144/year vs ($99 for first year + $79 for next years), and that's if you choose to upgrade Sketch every year, which you don't need to.
Figma also doesn't really work offline.
Once you are in Figma, you are trapped forever. No way to get out your original editable artwork files.
Buyer beware!
I could switch to Figma from Sketch very easily because I could upload my Sketch files in Figma and Figma could deconstruct them into layers and elements with even layer names intact!
Vice versa? No.
Even Photoshop files .PSD are readable in many other photo editing apps.
Figma.. no never.
However, the only page I found is https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041060434-Genera..., which says they’re committed to your privacy, but doesn’t mention data portability.
Native is nice, native is fast, and it will have its place (compare how bad is Google Meet compared to Zoom with respect to CPU/RAM), but web is becoming "good enough".
thats rarely true for complex web apps... (doubly true if your using firefox)
Only if you are using a Mac. On linux, the zoom client is neither fast nor (in my admittedly slightly subjective opinion) nice.
I see my processor spin up to 90% utilization whenever I do a zoom call.
edit: judging by `strings`, it's Objective C/Cocoa app on Mac. As native as it can be. No idea on Linux.
edit
just judged on dependencies of the deb package, it looks like a native app. But, I will check the actual app.
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204206269-Installi...
It's a generous subscription, but it's still basically a subscription once you're not working in a silo.
Having a standard UX across platforms optimized for the uncommon case. The more common case is that the user sticks to one platform so learning an astandard set of conventions is a barrier.