Will there be a UI persona for AD?

[MarcL]

Hey Guys,

 

I was going to post a list of feature requests on the Feature Request Forum, but insead I think I can somehow ask it in one question...here goes.

 

Will there ever be a robust UI persona for UX/UI work (maybe something a little similar to Sketch 3 where all the artborads are tiled next to each other, plugins support, css attributes, UI templates, maybe something for prototyping like Mirror or a plugin that would allow this, etc)?

 

I use Sketch for some of my work, but I really wish that I could just use Affinity for everything since I pretty much mastered the software already. I just wanted to know if this is something the Affinity team have thought about, since a lot of designers are now moving to a lot more UI type of workflow.

 

Thanks in advance guys. Keep up the awesome job!! And I cain't wait for Affinity Photo to finally make it in the app store. :)

 

Marc,

 

 

[Leigh]

Well, Art Boards are listed on the AD roadmap :) I'm not sure about your other suggestions - hopefully one of the developers will swing by and give you a better answer. 

[MattP]

Art boards are going to be tiled in the normal view pretty soon... no need for an extra Persona - you want to see them all the time anyway, so we don't want to hide them away. Plugins are tricky - it depends exactly what we're talking about? Most of the time we could do a better job in the software because we have access to everything and know the software inside-out so we will be able to create something much more optimised and efficient if it's something our users want... CSS attributes... well, in my build I've been able to get it to dump me the CSS attributes of a selection for a couple of years now, but we don't know where to put it at the moment, so that's why you're not seeing it yet - we'll get this and many more things added soon... UI templates are definitely coming - we were waiting for the announcement of iOS 9 before making some - and that's not far off now! :) A 'mirror' style app is interesting but first and foremost I'd want it to work reliably! :S We've had our iPhones and iPads connected to Designer for years with research projects that let us control the application and we've also written a full-on version of Designer that runs on the iPad very fluidly - I'm more tempted to say that we'd prefer to just charge the users a small fee to get a full version of Designer on their iPad and use Hand-off to pass documents back and forth? It actually works very nicely in reality...

 

Basically, all I'm trying to say is that we are very focused on delivering in those areas in the coming months - we've set the stage by making our app work well for illustration and now we're going to gradually take on more and more use-cases and get them properly sorted. :)

[MarcL]

Thanks MattP.

 

I like your comment there on Mirror. :D it's so true! And it makes sence that you guys would rather create everything internally, b/c sometimes plugins can get klunky. There are some good ones on github, but a lot of klunky ones as well that I'd have to delete the second I use it. 

 

I can't wait till those things come in, this is all very exciting stuff and exactly what I need! :) Thanks again for painting a picture of what's to come in AD, I've been curious about it for awhile now everytime I hit a snag on Sketch.

[Ben]

We're also interested in any "snags" you find in Sketch.  These might help us shape our tools to do a better job.

[smallreflection]

You guys make me happy much. :D  I'm using Designer 90% for UI work right now, so all this stuff sounds great!

 

Basically, all I'm trying to say is that we are very focused on delivering in those areas in the coming months - we've set the stage by making our app work well for illustration and now we're going to gradually take on more and more use-cases and get them properly sorted. :)

[AshTeriyaki]

We're also interested in any "snags" you find in Sketch.  These might help us shape our tools to do a better job.

 

Here's a mix of feature requests and Sketch/Illustrator snags, I've tried not to mention anything you guys have already confirmed (But there might be a few in there)

 

Symbols & styles

• Nestable - Symbol in a symbol with a shared style on a thingy in a symbol. In space.
• Searchable - Universal object and layer searching would cover this :)
• Clear organisation - sketch lacks a proper panel for organising symbols and styles. Styles and symbols should be group-able.
• Keynote and pages type style control - Sketch can be fussy with cmd+z, often you end up inadvertently breaking styles and text styles, changes once applied should be local until you click "Update". This also makes sketch-style text frame omission unnecessary.
• Inheritance from palette and symbols - if you change a global colour used in a style or symbol, it should affect all styles and symbols. The same should be true of styles inside symbols.

 

Artboards

• Artboard organisation - stacking by row and column with defineable margins, maybe a nice 'pack by order' method.
• Parenting - nesting artboards under others for export and organisation. For example, a web design with all of the desktop screens in an artboard group and the mobile in another.
• Esure pasting artwork respects selected artboard bounds.
• Toggle artboard boundary visibility.
• Move multiple selected artboards.
• Lock/unlock artwork by artboard.
• Show/hide artboard or artboard group
• Optional scale artwork when scaling board.
• Optional guides by artboard.
• Create slice from artboard.
• Create artboard from selection bounds
• Move artwork with board - Illustrator has an annoying bit of behaviour if you drag a board too close to a neighbor and velcro's an object from another artboard to the one you're currently moving, this is rubbish.

 

General

• CSS compliant filters - CSS filter allows hue rotations, saturation and a lot of advanced compositing effects, support has recently become very good.
• 9 slice scaling
• Placeholder image generation
• Option to copy colours as RGBA(0,0,0,0.1) or hex with leading hash, float, swift and objective C colours (Like skala colour)
• Guide multi selection, alignment and distribution
• Guide grid creation
• Snapshots in designer ;)

 

I/O

• Import and export text styles and symbols
• Export symbols to CSS file (With modern CSS3 feature support and vendor prefixes)
• Export Colour palettes and text styles to sass/less variables (Neat)
• Export path routing - Similar to sketch/adobe generator, putting /xxx in slice name creates a subdirectory and places the file in there
• ICNS & ICO generation

[MarcL]

I'm glad you put this up Ash, this is all so very important. :) You've covered more than I was going to be able to put up. Other issues I have with Sketch are just little things that adds up in the end. Sketch gets a little glitchy from time to time - like when I copy and paste a buch of different elements that's around 10MG or so, then I'll be beach ballin' it for awhile...little annoying things. AD is already great with a lot of things, but I think once some of these things you've posted gets covered more attention will start to shift towards AD for all their UI work.

 

Great post.