Custom keyboard that suggests emojis based on what you type..
Written entirely in Swift. Uses autolayout to deal with all the different keyboard layouts and orientations on the various iPhone and iPad sizes.
I used Paintcode to draw the beziers for all the accent keys (è é ê ë ę etc) and then it converts them to code. It has basic autocorrect (needs a lot of improvement if anyone has any ideas on how to improve that).
The emoji suggest happens via a big list of candidate terms that are then mapped to the unicode for each emoji.
hey kiro, there's a lot I like, but probably the best thing is that I find it fits the process that goes on back and forth between designers and developers. It's really good for that. Few other things:
- small team (4) that are pushing many builds a day
- really easy to slice and export e.g @2x and 1x
- vector, so easy to scale up and down
- lightweight
- super active community releasing plugins and resources.
- it's cheap.
- lots of good learning resources
I don't use photoshop anymore. really happy with it
Sketch has really changed my workflow. I think it really makes things much easier for developers who work with a designer or just need t cut up assets. Definitely worth checking out.
Sketch's main benefit is that it's built from the ground up to focus on vector-based design and composition, with a more modern, simplified approach to its interface. It makes it feel really light-on-its-feet and productive for UI design.
Photoshop is a powerhouse but has a lot of historical bloat built up over the years particularly around high-resolution bitmap editing. I mean it can paint a car out of a scene with a single brushstroke for chrissakes. Sketch has none of that, but in turn its vector feature set is super streamlined and thoughtful, so it's basically a UI designer's dream.
It would make a little more sense to compare it to Fireworks (may it rest in peace), as that was maybe a bit more suited to UI design than Photoshop.
My biggest benefit is working with multiple artboards. As we all know, design now starts with going mobile first. Right from the start there is a mobile view, tablet view, and desktop view.
Other pros
+ Text Styles (Save a font style for h1,h2,h3,p. Why hasn't anybody else done this?)
+ Better color picker because it magnifies to the pixel. Much easier/faster to find colors on text.
+ There's like 10 colors on your active palette. Photoshop is 2.
+ Faster to export images.
+ Duplicate/Copy anything faster than Photoshop.
+ Opens up way faster than Photoshop. Similar to opening a text editor.
I'd say there is zero learning curve. So much easier to get started for anyone new. My favorite thing about Sketch is the ability to use Pages and Artboards + Symbols for multiple screens design. That's the way I prototype nowadays; focusing on interactions and flows rather than static single screens and branding/image editing.
I think the most fundamental advantage is that Photoshop was designed to edit photos, whereas Sketch is clearly built for UI design. Because of that, it has the tools you are more likely to use in the right places and has a lot of built-in features specifically geared to designing UIs.
thanks for the feedback. Everything is still very much a learning process for us. Nathan, pointing to the side of the artist nodes is definitely cool, but the reason we had to steer away from that is that we're currently planning to add some new elements to the UI that do exactly that. (this would mean that the help and the UI elements would be doing the same thing in the future, which might get confusing).
Written entirely in Swift. Uses autolayout to deal with all the different keyboard layouts and orientations on the various iPhone and iPad sizes.
I used Paintcode to draw the beziers for all the accent keys (è é ê ë ę etc) and then it converts them to code. It has basic autocorrect (needs a lot of improvement if anyone has any ideas on how to improve that).
The emoji suggest happens via a big list of candidate terms that are then mapped to the unicode for each emoji.