15 ms·

How Sketch Took on Adobe

226 points by pmp301 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago
Maybe for macOS users, because it is nowhere to be seen on Windows.
- langitbiru 8y ago
  I don't know what they use to build Sketch. Probably Cocoa. If they use Electron, Sketch can be used even in Linux. But then you would have some people complain about the performance. You can not make everyone happy! :) But I think they can have the cake and eat it too if they use Qt. But the price of Qt library is quite steep (USD 5500 per year). I know, I know, you can use it freely if you use dynamic linking. But still....
  - neor 8y ago
    They don't use Electron. Their website states that they don't plan to release Windows or Linux versions because of the large amount of native MacOS API's they use making it very time consuming and costly to make a cross-platform version of the app.
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      I wonder how much apps like Sketch and Pixelmator rely on CoreImage to do the heavy lifting. They all seemed to appear after its introduction.
      - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
        Sketch is mostly vector-based...
        coldtea 8y ago
        Quartz is mostly vector-based as well... OS X has very good support for vector graphics, it's rendering engine is basically a version of PDF-style rendering (like old NeXT used "display postscript").
    - test1235 8y ago
      I guess there's a market for a windows/linux version of this app then? (tho' maybe not as large, given pro-designer tendencies towards macs)
      - arthurfm 8y ago
        There's a third-party app for Windows called Lunacy [1] that can read/write Sketch files, so there must be a market large enough to make that worthwhile. [1] https://icons8.com/lunacy https://icons8.com/lunacy
  - Frizi 8y ago
    There is also Figma, which is a direct competitor to sketch that is multiplatform, and they indeed run on electron (and even directly in browser). For me that's a great example of electron app done right, as you won't really notice any performance issues.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Doesn't that go without saying since it doesn't exist for the platform?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    No, because the article it is how Sketch is supposed to be something that Adobe actually needs to worry about, given the worldwide desktop market share of macOS.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      The overall desktop market share is not really relevant, if macOS has a disproportionate share of the designer market. Which has always been the case. Adobe back when I checked, made something like half of its profits of Suite on the Mac. John Nack (of Abobe) had commented on 2009: "Last time I checked, Creative Suite sales were roughly 50/50 Mac/Win." [1] So, the fact that Windows has more market share is irrelevant regarding whether Adobe should worry. More relevant things would be: 1) designer share of macOS/Windows might have skewed since 2009 (but even at worst case I'd expect a 30-40% to still be on Macs). 2) Sketch alone just tackles Illustrator duties, not several other things the Suite does. So it wouldn't be enough for Adobe to lose Suite buyers over -- just people only using Illustrator. But combined with newcomers like Affinity and co, it might.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        Not from designers that live in countries where Apple hardware is out of reach for the standard living costs.
        coldtea 8y ago
        Those designers would still be irrelevant for whether Adobe has to worry. Obviously, whether Adobe has to worry from a competitor that's OS X only depends on the percentage of OS X vs Windows users buying Adobe's program. If N% of Adobe's customers use OS X, then Adobe can still potentially lose up to N% of its users (the OS X using ones) to a competitor -- and whether there are tons of designers "living in countries where Apple hardware is out of reach" wont change this. (Besides in many such countries most designers will just pirate Adobe stuff too, so they're neither Adobe nor Apple's customers to begin with).
- princekolt 8y ago
  Maybe the fact it was developed specifically for Macs has something to do with it.
InGodsName 8y ago
I wonder why there aren't other cross platform sketch equivalent. Question for cross platform experts: If today, you were to create an app supporting Linux, Windows, Mac - which toolkit/framework we must use?
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Inkscape (built with gtkmm)? sk1?
- Frizi 8y ago
  There exist a great one, which is called Figma. They use electron in combination with WebAssembly to make it fast. I'd say that's a pretty decent choice.
  - test1235 8y ago
    jumping straight into webassembly! very brave ... or is it actually more mature (production-mature?) than I thought?
    - Frizi 8y ago
      Well, the support is pretty decent in evergreen browsers (and it already was for a while), and in case of electron, you have precise control over your runtime, so it's not really a problem. Also many engines have already done quite substantial optimizations for handling wasm modules in combination with JavaScript. It's all done with backward compatibility in mind, so what works today will continue to do so.
- Zealotux 8y ago
  >I wonder why there aren't other cross platform sketch equivalent. Adobe XD, InVision Studio (soon on Windows), Figma (in browser), Framer (soon on Windows).
- langitbiru 8y ago
  If budget is not an issue, I would use Qt with C++.
jerrre 8y ago
> Omvlee was very smart to target a large segment of the graphics sector’s largest, most powerful incumbent, as doing so created major tailwind for Sketch. Omvlee came to market with a differentiated product that was far better than even Adobe’s flagship product. Great tip: just create something better than the household product for a large segment. Why did I never think of that....
- jerrre 8y ago
  On a more positive note: What I really like about the Sketch story (correct me if I'm wrong), is that a small product-first focused company can make a big enough dent in an existing market. Kind of refreshing between all these marketing/sales-first VC fast growing in employee size companies with a bad fluff/action ratio.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    Is it an existing market? I got the impression a lot of their work and success has been around prototyping mobile applications. This is a niche nobody served and grew quite quickly.
    - nicky0 8y ago
      I think you could say it was a niche in an existing broader market, which had previously been covered by Illustrator and Photoshop. Sketch came along with a focused tool which did it better than the general-purpose tools. But it's not like UI protoyping was impossible before Sketch came along.
- cabraca 8y ago
  the problem ist the gap between your definition of "better" and your customers definition of "better".
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jimbokun 8y ago
philfrasty 8y ago
Wasn't there OmniGraffle on the Mac even before Sketch? Seemed to me in the beginning that Sketch was an exact clone of OmniGraffle with a little nicer interface. Sketch evolved a lot from that point on. Edit: OmniGraffle 1.0 launched 2001 [1], Sketch started 2008 [1] https://www.macworld.com/article/1002530/omnigraffe.html https://www.macworld.com/article/1002530/omnigraffe.html
- kalleboo 8y ago
  Does anyone use OmniGraffle to make final designs? I thought it was more of an outlining tool
- dfischer 8y ago
  OmniGraffle is more wireframing, low-fi.
- coldtea 8y ago
  OmniGraffle is for diagrams, general purpose vector drawing and UI design is not its forte. At best you do some prototype wireframing there.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    Yeah, OmniGraffle is awesome for diagramming, but awkward even for low-fi wireframes.
- stupidbird 8y ago
  Omnigraffle is very bad for visual design
rawTruthHurts 8y ago
Let me un-editorialise the title a bit: "How Sketch Took on Adobe by Making a Faster, Leaner, Cheaper Image Editor, which is kind-of-useful for a very specific field -as long as it works properly- and leaving Adobe pretty much to be the standard for everything else (but catching up, see XD)"
- pjmlp 8y ago
  And constrained to the few souls that use macOS for doing design. Which outside SV and first world countries isn't quite true. Might still be enough for Sketch to keep an healthy business but hardly enough to actually hit Adobe's business line.
  - mattkevan 8y ago
    Affinity is more of a threat to Adobe than Sketch. At work only the design and video teams have Adobe licences as they're so expensive, even though image editing is a common task throughout the business. When I showed Finance that volume licensing fees for Affinity were less than £20/year for both Photo and Designer, they immediately got licences for the whole company.
  - stupidbird 8y ago
    Most professional designers are still using Macs.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      So the countries where Apple doesn't have a presence don't have professional designers?
      - jinglebells 8y ago
        What countries are they?
        pjmlp 8y ago
techaddict009 8y ago
But have the really took over? I see designers who have shifted to Sketch pretty happy compared to using Photoshop or Illustrator to design something.
seanalltogether 8y ago
I've always been upset about the fact that Adobe abandoned Fireworks. Fireworks always made sense to me when I had to cobble together graphics for my websites or apps. Adobe behaves like a company not interested in expanding their market, but just simply doubling down on it's existing cash cows until the day they become irrelevant.
- samwillis 8y ago
  Completely agree, it was the perfect mix of vector and bitmap graphics!
- nexensis 8y ago
  Same here - Illustrator absorbed a lot of Fireworks features and offers decent optimised JPG/PNG/SVG exports for web, but over the last few years it's become excruciatingly slow while not really adding any new functionality. Even with a 24 thread CPU and 1080Ti it drops frames constantly, even when the document contains just a single circle. It regularly hangs for a second or two when zooming or adding new shapes or text to the document. After Effects & Premiere are even slower for video editing and are the cause of much swearing in our office. If Sketch and Figma can smoothly display 100+ populated screens with plenty of functionality then more power to them, we're definitely due competition in the graphics & video market.
- tootie 8y ago
  That's totally untrue. Adobe have made a humongous play into cloud/enterprise with acquisitions of digital marketing companies like Omniture and Day. They are now a very entrenched enterprise software vendor with Fortune 500s and that's way outside their creative offering. Look Adobe Marketing Cloud.
- stupidbird 8y ago
  Honestly they should have abandoned it earlier. Instead of building monoliths of legacy features/code they need to build full-on replacements every 5-10 years. I can't believe they're still actively developing Dreamweaver to this day. OF course, there's still not a replacement for Fireworks because they just rolled it into one of their other legacy products. XD is still not great.
therealmarv 8y ago
And today we have Adobe XD which is free. Actually I used it recently to open a .sketch file from a designer and it is the best free tool to open that files... what irony. Also a sign that Adobe really fears Sketch and now they are playing "here it is free" game :(
- krsdcbl 8y ago
  Still, it really does solve a problem. I wouldn't want to be working on a Mac just to have Sketch, as nice as it would be to be able to use it.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  It's an interesting problem for Adobe, obviously they have huge inertia behind their products, it's hard to change from a tool you have been using for a long time. On the other hand they are a big corporation that needs feeding, they can't afford to give away their main product. It isn't just Sketch, there are a whole bunch of developers nipping away at their heels. Many of them offer quality products that are good enough, especially for new users. I wouldn't bet on Adobe looking anything like it does now in ten or fifteen years time.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    As many companies have discovered, it's better to cannibalize your own market share with your own new cheaper product than let other companies eat your market share. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrMAzCHFUU&t=4m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrMAzCHFUU&t=4m28s
- open-source-ux 8y ago
  Adobe feels like it's playing catch-up when it comes to apps optimised for UI design. Programs like Sketch and Figma address this area particularly well. I'm just happy to see more alternatives in the design tools space and to see them thriving. Sketch, Figma, Affinity Designer are all some of the vector alternatives doing well. Affinity works on both Windows and Mac. They have a Photoshop alternative in their Photo app and soon a potential InDesign rival in their Publisher app.
tobr 8y ago
I was surprised this article doesn't mention DrawIt [1], Bohemian Coding's first (?) drawing app designed for UI elements and icons, which would seem rather familiar to any Sketch user today. It combined vector and pixel graphics, and allowed you to compose any number of effects like blurs, borders, shadows, bevels etc in a non-destructive stack. Sketch was launched a few years later [2], and the way I remember it, it first focused more on vector art illustration on an infinite canvas. It was only later that DrawIt was retired while Sketch took over a lot of the UI/icon tools. I always felt like the Sketch we have today is much more like the first version of DrawIt than the first version of Sketch. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20090609142331/http://www.bohemiancoding.com:80/drawit/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090609142331/http://www.bohemi... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20110225224308/http://www.bohemiancoding.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110225224308/http://www.bohemi...
dangthe 8y ago
And then Adobe released XD. I give Sketch about 3 more years before it becomes completely irrelevant.
- bhouston 8y ago
  Adobe is a powerful company and XD is gaining mind share pretty quickly and it is being heavily invested in. Thus it is a very serious threat to Sketch. At best case for Sketch it splits the market with Sketch in a few years. It is hard to predict the future here. How nimble is Sketch? How nimble is Adobe?
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  The last time I used XD it was woefully incomplete compared to Sketch. I wouldn't bet on them having this in the bag just because they're Adobe.
  - jasonlotito 8y ago
    Just last month we had our designers give a short demo of their new tools, and they compared Sketch with XD, and they went with XD. I know this is anecdotal (like everyone's comment is here), but considering the feedback they got from people they worked with when trialing in Sketch and XD, I'd have to say that XD impressed across the board, from designers to developers, more than Sketch did. And these are all people I respect. So while I wouldn't bet on them having this in the bag just because they're Adobe, I would bet on it based upon the feedback I heard and the fact that Adobe does have the ability to throw more resources at it.
- mattkevan 8y ago
  Adobe have been working on XD for ages and it still doesn't hold a candle to Sketch. It feels like it's born out of a scramble against Sketch, rather than from a deep desire to create the best interface design tool. There was a gap in the market ever since they killed Fireworks, and if they were serious about filling it they could have done something years before Sketch became big, but instead they slapped a few ui-focused features onto Photoshop, sat back and called it a day.
timrichard 8y ago
Absolutely love Sketch. I got a license because I thought it would be useful for UI design, but have been using it for all sorts of other things until I've trained properly on it (such as room layout planning, etc). Looking forward to using it for UX design when I know it a little better (I'm not a designer), but I also think it could become my go-to SVG generator (from what I've browsed on training courses from Lynda and Pluralsight).
tabs_masterrace 8y ago
Big reason for this is probably pricing. Adobe's subscription model is hard on startups, small companies & especially individuals, so people naturally look at alternatives. And then they realize that Photoshop isn't quite the monopoly it once was, and apps like Sketch, Affinity & Co. offer similar feature set, while also being more specialized for the job.
- toddmorey 8y ago
  Pricing is a part of it, sure, but the real reason I think is that Sketch was designed from the group up to be a tool for creating digital UI. Without the clutter and legacy of Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop, it was a breath of fresh air. Also, I think it has an important advantage of feeling like a native Mac app. I always feel like I’m firing up a virtual machine when I start Adobe products.
  - mattkevan 8y ago
    My fairly recent MacBook boots up in less time than Photoshop takes to open. Photoshop is amazing and I use it daily, but my goodness does it creak.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      Photoshop is 'slow to open' because it takes more time than your laptop uses to boot? That's nothing - have you never used GIMP?
      - avian 8y ago
        On my aging Lynnfield i5 and spinning-rust HDD, GIMP takes 2 seconds to open (I just timed it - from pressing return in a terminal, to all windows appearing on screen). That is faster than most websites load these days. And I should add that I have quite a lot of custom Python plug-ins installed. There's a lot of valid points that can be criticized about GIMP. Speed is not one of them.
mlangenberg 8y ago
The article should have also covered Figma, as I expect it to chew a large chunk of Sketch's market share. In my company almost every designer switched over from Sketch to Figma because of the collaboration and reviewing abilities. Designers invite developers (including remotes) to a read-only view on which they can place comments. This works really good. Maybe Sketch Cloud offers the same? It didn't catch on at our place.
- innergnome 8y ago
  We switched from Sketch to Figma in our team and love it. The possibility to work several people simultaneously is amazing. A killer function. Today we were 4 people working within the same artboard at the same time on a complex search/filter page. Reusing and building on each others ideas in real time increases the overall speed of designing tremendously.
- toddmorey 8y ago
  Figma would be impressive as a desktop app, but it’s even more impressive delivered through a browser. Just amazing engineering. I am continually amazed with how performant, reliable, and fast that browser-based graphics editor is. I forget I’m in the browser when I use it. Makes me excited for web assembly and the coming apps.
- oflannabhra 8y ago
  Not directly in Sketch, but our team uses Zeplin[0], which integrates with Sketch, for that use case. Our designers still prefer Sketch, and Zeplin has become an integral part of our workflow. [0] - https://zeplin.io https://zeplin.io
  - puranjay 8y ago
    I love the dimensions and color data you see when you hover over the main CTA on their homepage. Brilliant design
- sleepinseattle 8y ago
  Yea, Figma is incredible. I love seeing all the designers' cursors moving around, and being able to ask questions directly on the art board. There have been many cases where I've been trying to line up some buttons only to have the designer come in and move them around as I'm writing code. I also love the "infinite canvas" design, it feels great to have everything on one screen and just zoom in/zoom out to see details.
social_quotient 8y ago
From a tech perspective what’s the reason the Windows version of this is so allusive? Are there OS hooks that are so powerful on Mac that make a parallel development for windows an insurmountable task? Said from a windows ubuntu tech shop
- tootie 8y ago
  I think it's just market demand. They have finite capacity to develop and they get more returns by investing in OSX than expanding to Windows. There's always Zeplin for sharing designs to Windows users.
- futurix 8y ago
  Sketch heavily uses macOS specific APIs for drawing, hardware acceleration, widgets, etc - I'd imagine Windows version would be a nearly complete rewrite with much higher subsequent development costs.
  - vitaflo 8y ago
    Which is interesting because Adobe XD also heavily uses MacOS specific API's and had to do a complete rewrite to support Windows. But Adobe has the manpower to do that.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  Allusive? I think you mean illusive, or something.
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    Elusive, maybe.
rbreve 8y ago
There is still no photoshop substitute though
- jongold 8y ago
  Affinity make great products
maxdo 8y ago
They were the first but loosing created market to figma and other tools
zozbot123 8y ago
> We also know that Omvlee decided to monetize his product almost immediately. This wasn’t part of a larger revenue strategy; as a student, Omvlee was living a humble lifestyle and needed the [f]unds ... An interesting case of something that was clearly started as a "lifestyle business", but then managed to grow quite organically, with no real need for 'institutional' involvement.
vladdanilov 8y ago
> Omvlee decided to design his application to run natively on OS X. This was very smart. Although Omvlee could have reached a considerably wider audience by designing Sketch for Windows (or OS X and Windows), focusing on the Mac market was highly strategic Sketch exists thanks to the genius of Quartz / Core Graphics. It does not have a rendering engine per se and struggles even with path ops [1]. This technical debt may soon be the end of Sketch. Because apart from Adobe, there is now Figma with smart people like Evan Wallace who can really "decide" [2][3]. With C++ core, Figma can go fully native [4], and it's puzzling why they have done this already. [1] https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/892358827378696194 https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/892358827378696194 [2] https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/ https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to... [3] https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering-on-the-gpu-c3f4d782c5ac https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering... [4] https://twitter.com/evanwallace/status/673959396104273921 https://twitter.com/evanwallace/status/673959396104273921
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- yesimahuman 8y ago
  I’m guessing they haven’t because lots of designers love the Figma web app and it beats even the fully native experience Sketch bet on.
- on_and_off 8y ago
  There is also Affinity Designer. Sketch became a good enough default very quickly, but there are starting to be several competitors that are just as good if not way better.
  - arvinsim 8y ago
    Affinity Designer is also does not have the psuedo subscription style that Sketch uses. They also allow you to install it in as many machines as you like. Sketch forces you to buy a license for each of your computers.
virgilp 8y ago
It is a nice PR article, but if i was working at Bohemian, I wouldn't get overly confident. Sketch indeed did a nice job, and they carved out a market segment, but in doing so they caught Adobe's attention and it now responded by launching XD. As with a corporation that size, the response was maybe slow, but it is picking up steam and I speculate that in a few years XD will be an extremely tough competitor for Sketch. XD is already fairly good (sometimes better), it's already cross-platform, and Adobe has a relatively large and rather competent team of developers working on it. So I have little doubt that they'll soon have a better product on most, if not all aspects (1). The only thing that could derail it at this point is loss of executive support, but there's absolutely no sign of that, and I doubt it will happen. [disclaimer: I work for Adobe, but these are absolutely personal opinions, nothing vetted by my employer. And I don't work at XD, though I do know lots of people who do. ] (1) Adobe did that before. Witness e.g. Lightroom vs. Aperture, InDesign vs. Quark. It can be a formidable competitor when it's serious about something. And I get the feeling this time they are.
- hooch 8y ago
  Personally I’ll never go back to Adobe as long as they force me onto a monthly subscription.
  - otras 8y ago
    Assuming you use Sketch and that you renew your license yearly, why do you prefer a yearly subscription vs a monthly subscription?
    - colinjoy 8y ago
      Your question misses the point. With Sketch you _can_ subscribe to updates, which is entirely optional. The software is yours to use forever. Whereas with Adobe you _must_ subscribe and pay rent. If you fail to pay your regular fee, the mob will enter your workshop and drag out the tools you‘re dependent on (virtually speaking).
  - nuklearwanze 8y ago
zellyn 8y ago
The periodic references (mostly in a slightly negative tone) to not taking on funding were confusing.
androidgirl 8y ago
I'm absolutely happy people are taking on Illustrator/XD. I was a freelance illustrator specializing in print while in college, and have grown dislike Illustrator. The issues I'm having now with most design and vector art tools now are: * No Offline Support * No Linux Support. That leaves us with... well, just Inkscape. Honestly it has gotten decent with the most recent version. We finally have an objects menu, after 5 years of development. But features are still behind Sketch, AI, and Affinity. I'm well aware Linux users who are into drawing or design are a small minority, so I can't really complain.
- jonny_eh 8y ago
  Try https://www.figma.com/ https://www.figma.com/ ?
  - androidgirl 8y ago
    I checked Figma out before, afaik it doesn't let me locally save my files and work on them without Internet on Linux. Is that still the case now?
    - andrewthebold 8y ago
      Looks like they have limited offline capability if you've already loaded up a file you want to work on [1]. [1] https://help.figma.com/faqs/offline-mode https://help.figma.com/faqs/offline-mode
    - RobertKerans 8y ago
      Afaik that is still the case — they seem to have stuck with the web version. I used Gravit for a while, but they got bought by Corel and the application has gone from free to $100 for the "fully-featured" version (which given it's basically a beta and is missing what I consider key features, is a bit much). Akira [1] looks like it could possibly be the answer, but it's still a way off (though usable) [1] https://github.com/Alecaddd/Akira https://github.com/Alecaddd/Akira
    - twog 8y ago
ppeetteerr 8y ago
Sketch fit into the niche left behind when Adobe killed Fireworks.
jmull 8y ago
> In the blog post announcing the move, Omvlee cited three reasons for his decision to abandon the Mac App Store in favor of direct sales: ... Apple’s insistence that desktop apps available through the Mac App Store be sandboxed for additional security, a stipulation that was impractical for Sketch. I'm surprised by that. I'd have thought a user-document-based app like Sketch would be ideal for sandboxing.
jongold 8y ago
I remember the buzz when Sketch 2 came out in 2012. Tons of us switched immediately. Whilst I think Sketch has stagnated since then, what it initially offered was a lightweight tool that was designed around the types of primitives we used as designers. Most notably, CSS3 border radiuses were finally being supported, and doing them in Photoshop was awful. It was really simple stuff like that. It just felt right at the time.
abalone 8y ago
How does Figma compare to Sketch? The article is completely focused on Adobe but Sketch's greatest competition moving forward is from the free-to-get-started Figma. Not one mention of that. In fact the article kind of whiffs on this as it concludes that "Omvlee’s refusal to accept venture funding" was a "major driver of growth." Ehh.. really? Figma's funding has been a major factor in helping it do in a couple years what took Sketch a decade.
sodosopa 8y ago
Sketch allows anyone more access to really fuck up a design. Looks good, some of the plugins/extensions are top notch but overall, it took the best of ideas from inDesign and Illustrator and bastardized it and somehow people believe it's better. It's different, it's new, but it's not better. It's good for agencies and freelancers. We use it in corporate just to get the agencies to give us something better than a PDF.

226 points by pmp301 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago

Maybe for macOS users, because it is nowhere to be seen on Windows.

langitbiru 8y ago
I don't know what they use to build Sketch. Probably Cocoa. If they use Electron, Sketch can be used even in Linux. But then you would have some people complain about the performance. You can not make everyone happy! :) But I think they can have the cake and eat it too if they use Qt. But the price of Qt library is quite steep (USD 5500 per year). I know, I know, you can use it freely if you use dynamic linking. But still....
- neor 8y ago
  They don't use Electron. Their website states that they don't plan to release Windows or Linux versions because of the large amount of native MacOS API's they use making it very time consuming and costly to make a cross-platform version of the app.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    I wonder how much apps like Sketch and Pixelmator rely on CoreImage to do the heavy lifting. They all seemed to appear after its introduction.
    - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
      Sketch is mostly vector-based...
      - coldtea 8y ago
        Quartz is mostly vector-based as well... OS X has very good support for vector graphics, it's rendering engine is basically a version of PDF-style rendering (like old NeXT used "display postscript").
  - test1235 8y ago
    I guess there's a market for a windows/linux version of this app then? (tho' maybe not as large, given pro-designer tendencies towards macs)
    - arthurfm 8y ago
      There's a third-party app for Windows called Lunacy [1] that can read/write Sketch files, so there must be a market large enough to make that worthwhile. [1] https://icons8.com/lunacy https://icons8.com/lunacy
- Frizi 8y ago
  There is also Figma, which is a direct competitor to sketch that is multiplatform, and they indeed run on electron (and even directly in browser). For me that's a great example of electron app done right, as you won't really notice any performance issues.
coldtea 8y ago
Doesn't that go without saying since it doesn't exist for the platform?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  No, because the article it is how Sketch is supposed to be something that Adobe actually needs to worry about, given the worldwide desktop market share of macOS.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    The overall desktop market share is not really relevant, if macOS has a disproportionate share of the designer market. Which has always been the case. Adobe back when I checked, made something like half of its profits of Suite on the Mac. John Nack (of Abobe) had commented on 2009: "Last time I checked, Creative Suite sales were roughly 50/50 Mac/Win." [1] So, the fact that Windows has more market share is irrelevant regarding whether Adobe should worry. More relevant things would be: 1) designer share of macOS/Windows might have skewed since 2009 (but even at worst case I'd expect a 30-40% to still be on Macs). 2) Sketch alone just tackles Illustrator duties, not several other things the Suite does. So it wouldn't be enough for Adobe to lose Suite buyers over -- just people only using Illustrator. But combined with newcomers like Affinity and co, it might.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Not from designers that live in countries where Apple hardware is out of reach for the standard living costs.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        Those designers would still be irrelevant for whether Adobe has to worry. Obviously, whether Adobe has to worry from a competitor that's OS X only depends on the percentage of OS X vs Windows users buying Adobe's program. If N% of Adobe's customers use OS X, then Adobe can still potentially lose up to N% of its users (the OS X using ones) to a competitor -- and whether there are tons of designers "living in countries where Apple hardware is out of reach" wont change this. (Besides in many such countries most designers will just pirate Adobe stuff too, so they're neither Adobe nor Apple's customers to begin with).
princekolt 8y ago
Maybe the fact it was developed specifically for Macs has something to do with it.

InGodsName 8y ago

I wonder why there aren't other cross platform sketch equivalent. Question for cross platform experts: If today, you were to create an app supporting Linux, Windows, Mac - which toolkit/framework we must use?

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Inkscape (built with gtkmm)? sk1?
Frizi 8y ago
There exist a great one, which is called Figma. They use electron in combination with WebAssembly to make it fast. I'd say that's a pretty decent choice.
- test1235 8y ago
  jumping straight into webassembly! very brave ... or is it actually more mature (production-mature?) than I thought?
  - Frizi 8y ago
    Well, the support is pretty decent in evergreen browsers (and it already was for a while), and in case of electron, you have precise control over your runtime, so it's not really a problem. Also many engines have already done quite substantial optimizations for handling wasm modules in combination with JavaScript. It's all done with backward compatibility in mind, so what works today will continue to do so.
Zealotux 8y ago
>I wonder why there aren't other cross platform sketch equivalent. Adobe XD, InVision Studio (soon on Windows), Figma (in browser), Framer (soon on Windows).
langitbiru 8y ago
If budget is not an issue, I would use Qt with C++.

jerrre 8y ago

> Omvlee was very smart to target a large segment of the graphics sector’s largest, most powerful incumbent, as doing so created major tailwind for Sketch. Omvlee came to market with a differentiated product that was far better than even Adobe’s flagship product. Great tip: just create something better than the household product for a large segment. Why did I never think of that....

jerrre 8y ago
On a more positive note: What I really like about the Sketch story (correct me if I'm wrong), is that a small product-first focused company can make a big enough dent in an existing market. Kind of refreshing between all these marketing/sales-first VC fast growing in employee size companies with a bad fluff/action ratio.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Is it an existing market? I got the impression a lot of their work and success has been around prototyping mobile applications. This is a niche nobody served and grew quite quickly.
  - nicky0 8y ago
    I think you could say it was a niche in an existing broader market, which had previously been covered by Illustrator and Photoshop. Sketch came along with a focused tool which did it better than the general-purpose tools. But it's not like UI protoyping was impossible before Sketch came along.
cabraca 8y ago
the problem ist the gap between your definition of "better" and your customers definition of "better".
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jimbokun 8y ago

philfrasty 8y ago

Wasn't there OmniGraffle on the Mac even before Sketch? Seemed to me in the beginning that Sketch was an exact clone of OmniGraffle with a little nicer interface. Sketch evolved a lot from that point on. Edit: OmniGraffle 1.0 launched 2001 [1], Sketch started 2008 [1] https://www.macworld.com/article/1002530/omnigraffe.html https://www.macworld.com/article/1002530/omnigraffe.html

kalleboo 8y ago
Does anyone use OmniGraffle to make final designs? I thought it was more of an outlining tool
dfischer 8y ago
OmniGraffle is more wireframing, low-fi.
coldtea 8y ago
OmniGraffle is for diagrams, general purpose vector drawing and UI design is not its forte. At best you do some prototype wireframing there.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Yeah, OmniGraffle is awesome for diagramming, but awkward even for low-fi wireframes.
stupidbird 8y ago
Omnigraffle is very bad for visual design

rawTruthHurts 8y ago

Let me un-editorialise the title a bit: "How Sketch Took on Adobe by Making a Faster, Leaner, Cheaper Image Editor, which is kind-of-useful for a very specific field -as long as it works properly- and leaving Adobe pretty much to be the standard for everything else (but catching up, see XD)"

pjmlp 8y ago
And constrained to the few souls that use macOS for doing design. Which outside SV and first world countries isn't quite true. Might still be enough for Sketch to keep an healthy business but hardly enough to actually hit Adobe's business line.
- mattkevan 8y ago
  Affinity is more of a threat to Adobe than Sketch. At work only the design and video teams have Adobe licences as they're so expensive, even though image editing is a common task throughout the business. When I showed Finance that volume licensing fees for Affinity were less than £20/year for both Photo and Designer, they immediately got licences for the whole company.
- stupidbird 8y ago
  Most professional designers are still using Macs.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    So the countries where Apple doesn't have a presence don't have professional designers?
    - jinglebells 8y ago
      What countries are they?
      - pjmlp 8y ago

techaddict009 8y ago

But have the really took over? I see designers who have shifted to Sketch pretty happy compared to using Photoshop or Illustrator to design something.

seanalltogether 8y ago

I've always been upset about the fact that Adobe abandoned Fireworks. Fireworks always made sense to me when I had to cobble together graphics for my websites or apps. Adobe behaves like a company not interested in expanding their market, but just simply doubling down on it's existing cash cows until the day they become irrelevant.

samwillis 8y ago
Completely agree, it was the perfect mix of vector and bitmap graphics!
nexensis 8y ago
Same here - Illustrator absorbed a lot of Fireworks features and offers decent optimised JPG/PNG/SVG exports for web, but over the last few years it's become excruciatingly slow while not really adding any new functionality. Even with a 24 thread CPU and 1080Ti it drops frames constantly, even when the document contains just a single circle. It regularly hangs for a second or two when zooming or adding new shapes or text to the document. After Effects & Premiere are even slower for video editing and are the cause of much swearing in our office. If Sketch and Figma can smoothly display 100+ populated screens with plenty of functionality then more power to them, we're definitely due competition in the graphics & video market.
tootie 8y ago
That's totally untrue. Adobe have made a humongous play into cloud/enterprise with acquisitions of digital marketing companies like Omniture and Day. They are now a very entrenched enterprise software vendor with Fortune 500s and that's way outside their creative offering. Look Adobe Marketing Cloud.
stupidbird 8y ago
Honestly they should have abandoned it earlier. Instead of building monoliths of legacy features/code they need to build full-on replacements every 5-10 years. I can't believe they're still actively developing Dreamweaver to this day. OF course, there's still not a replacement for Fireworks because they just rolled it into one of their other legacy products. XD is still not great.

therealmarv 8y ago

And today we have Adobe XD which is free. Actually I used it recently to open a .sketch file from a designer and it is the best free tool to open that files... what irony. Also a sign that Adobe really fears Sketch and now they are playing "here it is free" game :(

krsdcbl 8y ago
Still, it really does solve a problem. I wouldn't want to be working on a Mac just to have Sketch, as nice as it would be to be able to use it.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
It's an interesting problem for Adobe, obviously they have huge inertia behind their products, it's hard to change from a tool you have been using for a long time. On the other hand they are a big corporation that needs feeding, they can't afford to give away their main product. It isn't just Sketch, there are a whole bunch of developers nipping away at their heels. Many of them offer quality products that are good enough, especially for new users. I wouldn't bet on Adobe looking anything like it does now in ten or fifteen years time.
- PakG1 8y ago
  As many companies have discovered, it's better to cannibalize your own market share with your own new cheaper product than let other companies eat your market share. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrMAzCHFUU&t=4m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrMAzCHFUU&t=4m28s
open-source-ux 8y ago
Adobe feels like it's playing catch-up when it comes to apps optimised for UI design. Programs like Sketch and Figma address this area particularly well. I'm just happy to see more alternatives in the design tools space and to see them thriving. Sketch, Figma, Affinity Designer are all some of the vector alternatives doing well. Affinity works on both Windows and Mac. They have a Photoshop alternative in their Photo app and soon a potential InDesign rival in their Publisher app.

tobr 8y ago

I was surprised this article doesn't mention DrawIt [1], Bohemian Coding's first (?) drawing app designed for UI elements and icons, which would seem rather familiar to any Sketch user today. It combined vector and pixel graphics, and allowed you to compose any number of effects like blurs, borders, shadows, bevels etc in a non-destructive stack. Sketch was launched a few years later [2], and the way I remember it, it first focused more on vector art illustration on an infinite canvas. It was only later that DrawIt was retired while Sketch took over a lot of the UI/icon tools. I always felt like the Sketch we have today is much more like the first version of DrawIt than the first version of Sketch. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20090609142331/http://www.bohemiancoding.com:80/drawit/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090609142331/http://www.bohemi... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20110225224308/http://www.bohemiancoding.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110225224308/http://www.bohemi...

dangthe 8y ago

And then Adobe released XD. I give Sketch about 3 more years before it becomes completely irrelevant.

bhouston 8y ago
Adobe is a powerful company and XD is gaining mind share pretty quickly and it is being heavily invested in. Thus it is a very serious threat to Sketch. At best case for Sketch it splits the market with Sketch in a few years. It is hard to predict the future here. How nimble is Sketch? How nimble is Adobe?
jakelazaroff 8y ago
The last time I used XD it was woefully incomplete compared to Sketch. I wouldn't bet on them having this in the bag just because they're Adobe.
- jasonlotito 8y ago
  Just last month we had our designers give a short demo of their new tools, and they compared Sketch with XD, and they went with XD. I know this is anecdotal (like everyone's comment is here), but considering the feedback they got from people they worked with when trialing in Sketch and XD, I'd have to say that XD impressed across the board, from designers to developers, more than Sketch did. And these are all people I respect. So while I wouldn't bet on them having this in the bag just because they're Adobe, I would bet on it based upon the feedback I heard and the fact that Adobe does have the ability to throw more resources at it.
mattkevan 8y ago
Adobe have been working on XD for ages and it still doesn't hold a candle to Sketch. It feels like it's born out of a scramble against Sketch, rather than from a deep desire to create the best interface design tool. There was a gap in the market ever since they killed Fireworks, and if they were serious about filling it they could have done something years before Sketch became big, but instead they slapped a few ui-focused features onto Photoshop, sat back and called it a day.

timrichard 8y ago

Absolutely love Sketch. I got a license because I thought it would be useful for UI design, but have been using it for all sorts of other things until I've trained properly on it (such as room layout planning, etc). Looking forward to using it for UX design when I know it a little better (I'm not a designer), but I also think it could become my go-to SVG generator (from what I've browsed on training courses from Lynda and Pluralsight).

tabs_masterrace 8y ago

Big reason for this is probably pricing. Adobe's subscription model is hard on startups, small companies & especially individuals, so people naturally look at alternatives. And then they realize that Photoshop isn't quite the monopoly it once was, and apps like Sketch, Affinity & Co. offer similar feature set, while also being more specialized for the job.

toddmorey 8y ago
Pricing is a part of it, sure, but the real reason I think is that Sketch was designed from the group up to be a tool for creating digital UI. Without the clutter and legacy of Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop, it was a breath of fresh air. Also, I think it has an important advantage of feeling like a native Mac app. I always feel like I’m firing up a virtual machine when I start Adobe products.
- mattkevan 8y ago
  My fairly recent MacBook boots up in less time than Photoshop takes to open. Photoshop is amazing and I use it daily, but my goodness does it creak.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    Photoshop is 'slow to open' because it takes more time than your laptop uses to boot? That's nothing - have you never used GIMP?
    - avian 8y ago
      On my aging Lynnfield i5 and spinning-rust HDD, GIMP takes 2 seconds to open (I just timed it - from pressing return in a terminal, to all windows appearing on screen). That is faster than most websites load these days. And I should add that I have quite a lot of custom Python plug-ins installed. There's a lot of valid points that can be criticized about GIMP. Speed is not one of them.

mlangenberg 8y ago

The article should have also covered Figma, as I expect it to chew a large chunk of Sketch's market share. In my company almost every designer switched over from Sketch to Figma because of the collaboration and reviewing abilities. Designers invite developers (including remotes) to a read-only view on which they can place comments. This works really good. Maybe Sketch Cloud offers the same? It didn't catch on at our place.

innergnome 8y ago
We switched from Sketch to Figma in our team and love it. The possibility to work several people simultaneously is amazing. A killer function. Today we were 4 people working within the same artboard at the same time on a complex search/filter page. Reusing and building on each others ideas in real time increases the overall speed of designing tremendously.
toddmorey 8y ago
Figma would be impressive as a desktop app, but it’s even more impressive delivered through a browser. Just amazing engineering. I am continually amazed with how performant, reliable, and fast that browser-based graphics editor is. I forget I’m in the browser when I use it. Makes me excited for web assembly and the coming apps.
oflannabhra 8y ago
Not directly in Sketch, but our team uses Zeplin[0], which integrates with Sketch, for that use case. Our designers still prefer Sketch, and Zeplin has become an integral part of our workflow. [0] - https://zeplin.io https://zeplin.io
- puranjay 8y ago
  I love the dimensions and color data you see when you hover over the main CTA on their homepage. Brilliant design
sleepinseattle 8y ago
Yea, Figma is incredible. I love seeing all the designers' cursors moving around, and being able to ask questions directly on the art board. There have been many cases where I've been trying to line up some buttons only to have the designer come in and move them around as I'm writing code. I also love the "infinite canvas" design, it feels great to have everything on one screen and just zoom in/zoom out to see details.

social_quotient 8y ago

From a tech perspective what’s the reason the Windows version of this is so allusive? Are there OS hooks that are so powerful on Mac that make a parallel development for windows an insurmountable task? Said from a windows ubuntu tech shop

tootie 8y ago
I think it's just market demand. They have finite capacity to develop and they get more returns by investing in OSX than expanding to Windows. There's always Zeplin for sharing designs to Windows users.
futurix 8y ago
Sketch heavily uses macOS specific APIs for drawing, hardware acceleration, widgets, etc - I'd imagine Windows version would be a nearly complete rewrite with much higher subsequent development costs.
- vitaflo 8y ago
  Which is interesting because Adobe XD also heavily uses MacOS specific API's and had to do a complete rewrite to support Windows. But Adobe has the manpower to do that.
zozbot123 8y ago
Allusive? I think you mean illusive, or something.
- kgwgk 8y ago
  Elusive, maybe.

rbreve 8y ago

There is still no photoshop substitute though

jongold 8y ago
Affinity make great products

maxdo 8y ago

They were the first but loosing created market to figma and other tools

zozbot123 8y ago

> We also know that Omvlee decided to monetize his product almost immediately. This wasn’t part of a larger revenue strategy; as a student, Omvlee was living a humble lifestyle and needed the [f]unds ... An interesting case of something that was clearly started as a "lifestyle business", but then managed to grow quite organically, with no real need for 'institutional' involvement.

vladdanilov 8y ago

> Omvlee decided to design his application to run natively on OS X. This was very smart. Although Omvlee could have reached a considerably wider audience by designing Sketch for Windows (or OS X and Windows), focusing on the Mac market was highly strategic Sketch exists thanks to the genius of Quartz / Core Graphics. It does not have a rendering engine per se and struggles even with path ops [1]. This technical debt may soon be the end of Sketch. Because apart from Adobe, there is now Figma with smart people like Evan Wallace who can really "decide" [2][3]. With C++ core, Figma can go fully native [4], and it's puzzling why they have done this already. [1] https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/892358827378696194 https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/892358827378696194 [2] https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/ https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to... [3] https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering-on-the-gpu-c3f4d782c5ac https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering... [4] https://twitter.com/evanwallace/status/673959396104273921 https://twitter.com/evanwallace/status/673959396104273921

deleted 8y ago
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yesimahuman 8y ago
I’m guessing they haven’t because lots of designers love the Figma web app and it beats even the fully native experience Sketch bet on.
on_and_off 8y ago
There is also Affinity Designer. Sketch became a good enough default very quickly, but there are starting to be several competitors that are just as good if not way better.
- arvinsim 8y ago
  Affinity Designer is also does not have the psuedo subscription style that Sketch uses. They also allow you to install it in as many machines as you like. Sketch forces you to buy a license for each of your computers.

virgilp 8y ago

It is a nice PR article, but if i was working at Bohemian, I wouldn't get overly confident. Sketch indeed did a nice job, and they carved out a market segment, but in doing so they caught Adobe's attention and it now responded by launching XD. As with a corporation that size, the response was maybe slow, but it is picking up steam and I speculate that in a few years XD will be an extremely tough competitor for Sketch. XD is already fairly good (sometimes better), it's already cross-platform, and Adobe has a relatively large and rather competent team of developers working on it. So I have little doubt that they'll soon have a better product on most, if not all aspects (1). The only thing that could derail it at this point is loss of executive support, but there's absolutely no sign of that, and I doubt it will happen. [disclaimer: I work for Adobe, but these are absolutely personal opinions, nothing vetted by my employer. And I don't work at XD, though I do know lots of people who do. ] (1) Adobe did that before. Witness e.g. Lightroom vs. Aperture, InDesign vs. Quark. It can be a formidable competitor when it's serious about something. And I get the feeling this time they are.

hooch 8y ago
Personally I’ll never go back to Adobe as long as they force me onto a monthly subscription.
- otras 8y ago
  Assuming you use Sketch and that you renew your license yearly, why do you prefer a yearly subscription vs a monthly subscription?
  - colinjoy 8y ago
    Your question misses the point. With Sketch you _can_ subscribe to updates, which is entirely optional. The software is yours to use forever. Whereas with Adobe you _must_ subscribe and pay rent. If you fail to pay your regular fee, the mob will enter your workshop and drag out the tools you‘re dependent on (virtually speaking).
- nuklearwanze 8y ago

zellyn 8y ago

The periodic references (mostly in a slightly negative tone) to not taking on funding were confusing.

androidgirl 8y ago

I'm absolutely happy people are taking on Illustrator/XD. I was a freelance illustrator specializing in print while in college, and have grown dislike Illustrator. The issues I'm having now with most design and vector art tools now are: * No Offline Support * No Linux Support. That leaves us with... well, just Inkscape. Honestly it has gotten decent with the most recent version. We finally have an objects menu, after 5 years of development. But features are still behind Sketch, AI, and Affinity. I'm well aware Linux users who are into drawing or design are a small minority, so I can't really complain.

jonny_eh 8y ago
Try https://www.figma.com/ https://www.figma.com/ ?
- androidgirl 8y ago
  I checked Figma out before, afaik it doesn't let me locally save my files and work on them without Internet on Linux. Is that still the case now?
  - andrewthebold 8y ago
    Looks like they have limited offline capability if you've already loaded up a file you want to work on [1]. [1] https://help.figma.com/faqs/offline-mode https://help.figma.com/faqs/offline-mode
  - RobertKerans 8y ago
    Afaik that is still the case — they seem to have stuck with the web version. I used Gravit for a while, but they got bought by Corel and the application has gone from free to $100 for the "fully-featured" version (which given it's basically a beta and is missing what I consider key features, is a bit much). Akira [1] looks like it could possibly be the answer, but it's still a way off (though usable) [1] https://github.com/Alecaddd/Akira https://github.com/Alecaddd/Akira
  - twog 8y ago

ppeetteerr 8y ago

Sketch fit into the niche left behind when Adobe killed Fireworks.

jmull 8y ago

> In the blog post announcing the move, Omvlee cited three reasons for his decision to abandon the Mac App Store in favor of direct sales: ... Apple’s insistence that desktop apps available through the Mac App Store be sandboxed for additional security, a stipulation that was impractical for Sketch. I'm surprised by that. I'd have thought a user-document-based app like Sketch would be ideal for sandboxing.

jongold 8y ago

I remember the buzz when Sketch 2 came out in 2012. Tons of us switched immediately. Whilst I think Sketch has stagnated since then, what it initially offered was a lightweight tool that was designed around the types of primitives we used as designers. Most notably, CSS3 border radiuses were finally being supported, and doing them in Photoshop was awful. It was really simple stuff like that. It just felt right at the time.

abalone 8y ago

How does Figma compare to Sketch? The article is completely focused on Adobe but Sketch's greatest competition moving forward is from the free-to-get-started Figma. Not one mention of that. In fact the article kind of whiffs on this as it concludes that "Omvlee’s refusal to accept venture funding" was a "major driver of growth." Ehh.. really? Figma's funding has been a major factor in helping it do in a couple years what took Sketch a decade.

sodosopa 8y ago

Sketch allows anyone more access to really fuck up a design. Looks good, some of the plugins/extensions are top notch but overall, it took the best of ideas from inDesign and Illustrator and bastardized it and somehow people believe it's better. It's different, it's new, but it's not better. It's good for agencies and freelancers. We use it in corporate just to get the agencies to give us something better than a PDF.