This post is a post I hate to write: When you decide to use something instead of something you have used previously, and you think that the decision you made is reasonable because it saves time, makes your work better, simply put helps you to get your stuff done quicker, you do not want to be find out that you are wrong, at least for now. Welcome to Sketch by Bohemian Coding.

My Weapons of choice

For the last 3 years I had the great pleasure to work with some really great people. We relaunched two online shops with responsive design (Breuninger.com and GALERIA Kaufhof). The people involved really pushed things forward and were extremely keen on getting things done in a very high quality.

For me as a designer that meant a few things: I was actually able to get to work with the front-end developers in a very close fashion. We did not create indefinite amounts of photoshop layouts for up to 6 breakpoints but were able to work with pattern libraries and moved forward as things were defined and tested by the stake holders, concept and UX designers.

A lot of things we were designing happened in the browser often times. Photoshop often served as a mere composer of fragments. Essentially I was free to use whichever tool was the fastest and most suitable for the job to be done. Perfect.

Resistance is futile

Now as of this writing I am working on a redesign of parts of one of the shops (actually it is an evolution of version 1.0). I figured that after using my RWD-Pad for the sketches I could finally install Sketch again after having played around with it very early on after it was released.

Credit where credit is due: Fonts

I loved the font management app by Bohemian Coding which was shut down after some time because they had trouble getting it to comply with the MacOS sandboxing as far as I remember. However I am still using Fonts by the very same company and think it is by far the best app for getting an overview over your (activated) fonts. So, I appreciate their work a lot.

Since everyone in the industry is using the app I give in after not being convinced before. But the job to be done now is simply not a Photoshop job and I did not feel like coding stuff. Either way of working would feel wrong. So here I am, with a freshly installed version of sketch, and I get to work on a new template view in different viewports …

Welcome to the Red October, in december

Boy was I in for a ride for the last few hours. I do not know whether you know the film Hunt for the Red October with Sean Connery as a Soviet submarine captain. In the film he does a manoeuvre where at some random point in time he abruptly changes the course of the submarine to figure out whether some enemy vessel is tailing him. This manoeuvre is called "Crazy Ivan".

Why am I writing about this? Using the Undo function in sketch (as of 3.4.3 and 3.4.2) is like that. You hit CMD + Z and you have no idea what happens next. You paste some text or move a group? Fine. You want to undo this? Fine. But instead of simply doing what you expect the app to do it deletes a completely other group and resets yet another text layer to the default text. Alright, that is not what I want, select REDO from the menu because a moved item is better than no item. Ha! Well, just like Marty McFly was not supposed to change history (luckily he did!) you do not get a box back which did not exist in the past. Result: Your work is gone and you cannot undo your (actually sketch's) actions which got rid of it. Well, why am I even getting annoyed by this? It is a simply rule of time travel: Avoid anything creating a temporal paradox!

But wait! I simply wanted to design something and made a mistake. If I would want to create temporal mayhem I would buy a flipping Delorean and not a license for the sketch app.

Sloppyness or lack of testing?

Scanning the release history of the previous versions of sketch I see huge amounts of bugs related to the undo function. I am not an app developer and have no clue about what it takes to make sure that undo actually means undo and not do-weird-things-unexpected-and-unreproducable. But I know one thing: Despite the fact that the app has an enormous amount of kick-arse features which are just right for UI and app design, this renders the software to be something that is not worth a penny right now.

The 3.4 release seems to be a disaster when you look around the web with even Bohemian Coding admitting that they did not really get things right. Well, to me as a new customer (again), I must say that I am extremely disappointed.

This must kill so many hours only because designers are trying to reproduce the work they already did.

Releasing software which such major flaws is a really, really bad thing to do. It is a shame for every single feature that does work so well in the app and all the many great thoughts that went into it. After all you can sink a huge boat with only a few tiny holes. Well that is what this feels like to me: A tool going down on my list of preferred apps. I hope this will be investigated, I filed bug reports, but there is no system to this error as it seems: Crazy, as I wrote above.

Please fix this

Please fix this Bohemian Coding before that sinking feeling turns into pure frustration. You have such a great product – why risk it by releasing stuff that kills it?

Looking forward to getting the fixed version asap. Thank you!