Michal Ždanský At the beginning of the month, the developers from Bohemian Coding announced that they will release the third version of their Sketch vector editor for Mac in April. And as they promised, it happened. Starting yesterday, the increasingly popular designer tool is in the Mac App Store for an introductory price of €44,99, which will be increased by sixty percent in a week. Sketch 3 is a big step forward compared to the previous second version and brings several new, essential functions and proper improvements.
The changes are already visible on the user interface itself. It has a partially new look, new icons, the alignment has moved above the inspector area, search is always visible, and flip buttons have also been added. The inspector itself is now only one-level, so color selection takes place via context menus. Sketch will also display basic colors straight away, unfortunately it is still not possible to have a custom palette for just one project. A lot of things have moved in general in the inspector, the arrangement is more logical.
Perhaps the most fundamental innovation is Symbols, which users of Adobe products may know as Smart Objects. You can mark any layer or layer group as a smart object and then easily insert it elsewhere in your project. Once you make changes to one symbol, it affects all the others. In addition, symbols share a common location with layer and text styles, which have been relatively hidden until now, so unification is highly desirable.
A very pleasant novelty is also the possibility of editing bitmap layers. Until now, you couldn't do anything with bitmaps other than zoom in or apply a mask, which isn't ideal when you only want to use part of a large image. Sketch can now cut out an image or color selected parts of it. It is even possible to select a certain part with a magic wand and convert it to vectors, but this is more of an experimental function that you will not use much due to its inaccuracy.
The export tool has also undergone a significant change, which now does not represent a separate mode, but each viewport behaves as a layer. With the new way of exporting, it is very easy to cut out individual elements, such as icons, or export the entire artboard with one click. Individual layers can even be dragged outside the application onto the desktop, which automatically exports them.
You will also find a number of other improvements throughout the application. These include a presentation mode, where all controls disappear and you can show your creations to others without a distracting application environment, added support for bulleted lists, unlimited use of fills, you don't have to start each new work on a clean sheet, but choose from several patterns, export to SVG and PDF has been improved and a number of other things that we will discuss later in a separate review.
If you are a graphic designer who mainly works on user interfaces for web or mobile applications, or designs logos and icons, Sketch 3 could be a good replacement for Photoshop/Illustrator for this work. For everyone else, Sketch 3 is a very friendly and intuitive graphics editor for a relatively decent price of $50 (but only for a limited time).
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This step on the part of Bohemian Coding is quite annoying. I purchased Sketch earlier this year and now to pay for it again. It offers a free transition only if you purchased the product after March 1.3.2014, XNUMX (i.e. roughly a month ago). I consider this act unethical. It would be enough to announce at least some time in advance that a new, separately sold version is coming. One would then consider whether it is worth waiting. However, I understand that a little decency would negatively affect sales.
What I like about this is CodeKit's upgrade policy from version 2 to version 3, where the upgrade price is tiered based on the age of purchase of the previous version.
It sounds interesting. Maybe it could serve as inspiration for other developers. The only obstacle here will probably be the rules of the App Store.
So that someone does not misinterpret my previous post, I will add this: I understand that the gentlemen from Bohemia Coding have done a lot of work between version 2 and 3 and logically they want to pay for their work. I just don't like the approach.
but you fully knowingly paid for the features in version 2, which you were obviously satisfied with. if you want something else, you have to again. BMW also won't give you a new car if you bought the old model two months before the new one just because you bought it recently. new product, new price. I'm fine with it, a person likes to pay for quality work done. if you are comfortable with version 2, no one is forcing you to update
Yes, your argument has its own logic and you are also right that no one is forcing me to update. As I said, I understand and respect that they want to pay, but they could have told me that a new version is coming, which will be sold separately.
The fact that updating the application instead of replacing it with new ones is a common practice in the app store, people are used to it and somehow expect it. Thus, even if a person buys version 2, he waits for the familiar "update" button to appear in the app store, and he will also have version 3. As a precedent, we can take the popular Pixelmator, which constantly releases new versions and functions. During its lifetime, this software has developed so much that it would certainly be possible to release it several times.
I might add that, unlike the AppStore, a trial version is also available for download on the manufacturer's website.
So I wrote to them yesterday that it annoys me that the popularity of this software has grown on us who have been using the application for some months and based on our references. And thanks to these early adopters, Sketch 3 could be created in the first place, it doesn't offer any discounted price. I got this response today:
Hi Martin,
Well, we really would love to be able to have a way to provide upgrade pricing for all our customers, but the Mac App Store simply doesn't allow us to, we either give it away for free or we charge the full price, they 're that strict.
We try to overcome this by offering a limited offer to customers who purchased in the last 45 days. Why?
During these 45 days we already had Sketch 3 finished, and waiting for review on Apple's end, these users wouldn't have bought Sketch 2 if Sketch 3 was available.
Apple itself doesn't quite “allow” Apps sold through the Mac App Store to do this outside of their “realm”, and we still do that against their will, and that not only damages our chances of being featured by them, which can be quite a financial hit on our end, and also hinders our chances of wide adoption.
To do so, we implemented a serial system on Sketch 3 and in exchange of their receipt, we manually check each, and create a serial, email said person back… imagine doing this daunting task for more than 4000 customers, and now imagine doing the same for every single customer of the last two years.
Also, Sketch 2 was initially available for 39$ and it ran for two years, during that period, we offered 16 updates, 8 of which were major and the features changelog (not only bugs) accounted for more than 100 entries, all based in customer feedback, those 16 updates were completely free.
On top of those two years, Sketch 1 also ran for two years, and the update from Sketch 1 to 2 was already free for all customers.
Sorry, but this was the best we could do.
Best Regards,