Data population in designer

[AshTeriyaki]

There's a really great sketch plugin called craft (By the geniuses over at inVision, who you guys should totally talk to.) it does a few things - stylesheet creation, object duplication etc

 

But! The most useful features are photo placing and data generation.

 

Photo placement

 

Randomises photos from unsplash or a folder (Or dropbox) if you choose unsplash you get the choice of category. It then masks a photo behind every selected object on the artboard. You guys already have photo searching in AP and once symbols are up and running this should be pretty straightforward to implement right? It's killer.

 

Data generation

 

They allow adding text data to selected objects, they have a bunch of options including:

 

• Names (Male and or female)
• Headlines (Selectable topic)
• Articles (Scraped from somewhere)
• Dates (With basic formatting)

There are an utter arseload of data generation libraries out there, you guys would just be writing an interface around one right? Theres a few tricks craft is currently missing like custom generation patterns (Address would only produce the street for example, so you'd need multiple clicks to generate a full address) 

 

These are both quite simple bits and INCREDIBLY useful. I feel theres a bit of scope creep with craft as is, but given the publisher it makes full sense why.

[jmac]

I wish I understood...well, anything you said here. :) But I'm sure there are plenty who do.

[AshTeriyaki]

If you create a layout, let's say a list of contacts for an app. You've put in a full list of hypothetical contacts for your mockup. With this, you can select the avatars, for example, click a button and they are all populated with randomly selected headshots. You could then select the name fields and auto populate them with randomly generated names.