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Designer Vs. Sketch and Photoshop: Article by Tom Koszyk


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This article by fantastic writer Tom Koszyk https://medium.com/product-design-ux-ui/the-perfect-ux-ui-design-tool-13-things-designers-needs-most-f35589ce18e1

highlights some very good points about Affinity Designer and the competition. I think it was well written and should be taken seriously. My question is: Will the issues raised here be addressed? I want to see Designer win all of these competitions. Thanks.

 Computer Specs (If it helps) iMac 5k 2015 4.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz) 1TB Fusion Drive

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Mostly.  We have plans, just need time to do something about them.  We should be able to at least do what Sketch does, but better.

SerifLabs team - Affinity Developer
  • Software engineer  -  Photographer  -  Guitarist  -  Philosopher
  • iMac 27" Retina 5K (Late 2015), 4.0GHz i7, AMD Radeon R9 M395
  • MacBook (Early 2015), 1.3GHz Core M, Intel HD 5300
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Don't underestimate Sketch because they are fairly new and it's just a two men job behind the project.

Hardware
 Mac mini (late-2014), 2.6GHz, 16GB RAM, Intel Iris 5100 Graphics  iPad Air 16GB White

Software I love, and you should get :wink:
Affinity Desinger - Affinity Photo - Sketch - Coda - CodeKit - iA Writer - Dropbox - 1Password

 

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No one is underestimating.  We are just confident that we have good foundations on which to build our tools.

SerifLabs team - Affinity Developer
  • Software engineer  -  Photographer  -  Guitarist  -  Philosopher
  • iMac 27" Retina 5K (Late 2015), 4.0GHz i7, AMD Radeon R9 M395
  • MacBook (Early 2015), 1.3GHz Core M, Intel HD 5300
  • iPad Pro 10.5", 256GB
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The measurement implementation in sketch alongside snapping is really lovely ;)

@shmoo, a two man job? That´s truly amazing :o

 

I think AD is a hybrid between PS and ID and UI Design is not it´s core function as it is with sketch - that´s important to keep in mind.

 

 

Personally I wonder why his AD crashes so often. The post is 5 days old - so it´s the current version - but I personally don´t have crash problems :o

 

 

It´s really neat to see what everybody does with AD. From UI Design to vector art/ painting down to creating floor drafts. 

 

EDIT:

https://www.behance.net/tomkoszyk

The authors bahance page is worth noticing - IMO nice work :) 

 

 

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Personally I wonder why his AD crashes so often. The post is 5 days old - so it´s the current version - but I personally don´t have crash problems :o

 

 

He mentions he's using the transparency tool on images - that was broken in the released Mac App Store version but fixed by the first beta we released the other day... :)

 

I read his article and thought it was very good too :)  We've got a long way to go, but it's important to note that Designer was built to do everything really well - but we only had time to fully develop the illustration tools prior to launch and we're now trying to move on to developing the UI design tools and professional print capabilities now - so we'll get there :)

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I worked with Sketch on some UI projects last year and it was buggy and inconsistent once the project got complex. For simple projects it was fine though. For one project I ended up having to rebuild about 40% of my work because Sketch wouldn't re-open the file or if it did it was totally unresponsive. And to be honest I haven't picked it up since, although they released a few updates. Sketch has some nice features, but Affinity Designer is a VERY different kind of app... it has a much broader scope of utility and tools, even if the 1.3 release hasn't matched all the features Sketch 3.3.3 currently has.

2021 16” Macbook Pro w/ M1 Max 10c cpu /24c gpu, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Ventura 13.6

2018 11" iPad Pro w/ A12X cpu/gpu, 256 GB, iPadOS 17

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I'm wondering how the snapping and distance/measurement features hold up when your design gets complicated.  I've used similar looking stuff in Pixelmator and Photoshop, and it quickly becomes a hinderance as soon as you have a few objects on the spread.

 

So, while all the videos I've seen show wonderfully simple examples of using the snapping and distance tools in Sketch - they only ever show three or four shapes.  How does it scale when you have 100, and you want to move something accurately?  Is it just as good then?

 

We've tried to be more restrictive with our snapping features to stop them fighting against what you are trying to achieve.  I'm also going to look at the distance/measurement tool very soon, and this will work closely with the snapping logic.  So, my real question is - are we doing the right thing with our snapping candidate approach, or has Sketch solved all the problems?

SerifLabs team - Affinity Developer
  • Software engineer  -  Photographer  -  Guitarist  -  Philosopher
  • iMac 27" Retina 5K (Late 2015), 4.0GHz i7, AMD Radeon R9 M395
  • MacBook (Early 2015), 1.3GHz Core M, Intel HD 5300
  • iPad Pro 10.5", 256GB
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Ben, I dig the snapping candidate logic in Designer, even though sometimes it doesn't pick up the object I'm hovering over... I think extending that type of user-selectable-while-hovering method to tell Designer which objects to measure and display spacing info would be great and a natural extension of how it already works...

 

my 2 cents...

 

I'm wondering how the snapping and distance/measurement features hold up when your design gets complicated.  I've used similar looking stuff in Pixelmator and Photoshop, and it quickly becomes a hinderance as soon as you have a few objects on the spread.

 

So, while all the videos I've seen show wonderfully simple examples of using the snapping and distance tools in Sketch - they only ever show three or four shapes.  How does it scale when you have 100, and you want to move something accurately?  Is it just as good then?

 

We've tried to be more restrictive with our snapping features to stop them fighting against what you are trying to achieve.  I'm also going to look at the distance/measurement tool very soon, and this will work closely with the snapping logic.  So, my real question is - are we doing the right thing with our snapping candidate approach, or has Sketch solved all the problems?

2021 16” Macbook Pro w/ M1 Max 10c cpu /24c gpu, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Ventura 13.6

2018 11" iPad Pro w/ A12X cpu/gpu, 256 GB, iPadOS 17

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+1 for the measuring tool. 

 

As for the article as a whole; being mentioned at all is a testament to those fevered brows in Nottingham! Not bad for an app that's not been upgraded to V 2.0 yet. The review seemed pretty balanced to me.

MacBook pro, 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB, OS X 10.11.6

 

http://www.pinterest.com/peter2111

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I'm wondering how the snapping and distance/measurement features hold up when your design gets complicated. 

 

Guides work globally through your artboard so you can move your objects around and see the snapping/alignment lines of almost any object in the artboard. The measurement tool only works inside groups (folders) which makes perfectly sense when it comes to web and app design because you'd never group 30+ objects into a single folder like you would for example when dealing with icons.

 

See my example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRd38Vpaz1g&feature=youtu.be

Hardware
 Mac mini (late-2014), 2.6GHz, 16GB RAM, Intel Iris 5100 Graphics  iPad Air 16GB White

Software I love, and you should get :wink:
Affinity Desinger - Affinity Photo - Sketch - Coda - CodeKit - iA Writer - Dropbox - 1Password

 

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