However the next bit is more interesting. Many people have asked me to record more video tutorials and indeed the selection we have on our website is a bit limited.
However last week Alian Arco contacted me to tell me he had started a series of screencasts about Sketch on his YouTube channel. I have very little time myself to record any so I’m incredibly grateful to him for providing these. I know how much time these take.

At this moment are three tutorials on Sketch and one discussing various alternatives to Adobe CS. He told me he’ll add more over time. I recommend anyone who’s just getting started with Sketch to take a look at them and subscribe.

For a long time we’ve had two drawing apps; DrawIt and Sketch. Both are vector-based and DrawIt added support for bitmap filters on top of that. This was a fundamental difference and made DrawIt a very powerful application – in theory.
In practice it meant that the app was significantly slower than Sketch and that text rendering was even worse than Photoshop’s. These two were the main reasons for developing Sketch; I wanted a fast light-weight vector drawing app with perfect text rendering.

Over time I’ve come to realise that having two drawing apps makes no sense. The fact that Adobe has Photoshop and Illustrator does not mean its a good idea for us to have the same. All I needed to add to Sketch were bitmap filters and DrawIt would be obsolete. Sketch doesn’t have this (yet?), but we have added a pixel preview in the last beta and we’re getting closer.

Instead of selling customers and app that I know won’t be updated anymore I decided to remove DrawIt from the website immediately. While I know there’s no good alternative yet in Sketch, it felt wrong to pretend that DrawIt was still a good purchase. I want to be proud of the apps I sell and this was no longer the case with DrawIt. It would go to far to explain the fundamental architectural flaws in DrawIt, but suffice to say the idea was a good but the implementation less so.

My goal at the moment is to add the last missing bits from DrawIt to Sketch. When that is done I’ll make sure a cross-upgrade is easy by making sure Sketch can better read DrawIt files and by giving DrawIt customers a cheap way to get their hands on Sketch. I will have more news on that once Sketch is ready for this.

I wanted to wait with this blog post until I had something more concrete to offer, but too many people have asked me personally about DrawIt and so I thought I would do better to explain it on my blog. If there are more questions, please make a comment or write to our support directly.
Thank you for listening

Those of you already running the GM will have found lots of seemingly random crashes and those should now be a thing of the past. Apple has changed a lot under the hood for the technologies we’re using and this update addresses those issues. I was in a hurry to get those fixes out and haven’t yet had the time to make Fontcase’s fullscreen mode work on Lion, so that will have to wait for a future update.

You may also notice that the App should load its library a lot faster, but on launching, switching views and especially searching. We hope you like this update.

We’ve streamlined the interface and put the Compare pane right in the main UI. The Source List is gone and the font previews are now on the right – however there’s a preference item to put it on the bottom instead.

Brand new in Fontcase 2.0 is Typesetter; a novel new way to preview fonts in any combination and on any website. The Typesetter can display any web page, text can be edited on it and you can apply any font from your Library to a particular piece of text. The Typesetter truly is the best way to see how fonts will look in an actual design, or how different fonts work together in different roles.

Together with Fontcase 2.0 we have developed an iOS companion app that works as a viewer for the Mac version. The Mac version will automatically send high-resolution previews of the selected fonts to the iPhone. The iPhone’s Retina display is the best way to see how fonts look in great detail.

Upgrading

For Fontcase 2.0 we’ve decided to go App Store-only. This means unfortunately that we can’t offer existing 1.0 customers a discounted upgrade price. To remedy this we’re introducing Fontcase 2.0 in the App Store for just $29 for the first two weeks. So if you’d like to get Fontcase, be sure to get it while the introductory pricing lasts.

I would like to offer people who very recently bought Fontcase 1.0 a free upgrade, but Apple only gives away 50 promo codes per update, which is not enough right away.
So I have decided I will shortly be sending everyone who bought Fontcase in April or May an email. They can either join the queue waiting to receive a promo code, or if they want they can go and purchase Fontcase 2.0 on the App Store, send me their receipt and their Fontcase 1.0 license key and I will send them $30 back via PayPal.

But please go to the App Store and check out Fontcase. If you like the application, please go and rate the application or leave a review. It’s the best way to help other people discover Fontcase.

Excellent Apps

Fontcase has never before been available in a bundle but when the folks over at Fusion Ads contacted me I was pursuaded to give it a go, and its in excellent company; Billings, Versions and Kaleidoscope are in the bundle as well. Be sure to check it out at fusionads.net/bundle. It’s available for two more weeks at the moment of writing so don’t miss it.

Unfortunately I had many other projects taking up all my time but a few weeks ago I finally found the time to start on a major update and it is progressing well. This version of SketchPad, which will probably be a 2.0, has been slowly progressing and quite to my satisfaction. (I hope to be able to share some details soon.) As a consequence, the current version started to look bleaker and bleaker. So last Friday I’ve decided to remove it from the App Store.

I would like to think that my applications have a certain level of quality and polish. While I can see room for improvement in all my applications, SketchPad has been under that limit for too long. I hope version 2.0 will hopefully impress you all and give Sketch a worthy companion on the iPad.

The bundle’s theme is graphics applications so you’re bound to find something useful there. It runs for 20 days and costs only $39; that’s less than Sketch on its own!
There’s even a way to get it for free if you spread the word around.

App Savvy

I was also recently honoured to discover that one of my other applications (Review) is showcased in a book about developing awesome iPhone and iPad apps. The book is called App Savvy (Amazon link) and as a thanks to the author, there’s my little plug for that book.

Inspector

The blending modes available are the same as those in Adobe’s Illustrator, so I think this’ll satisfy those familiar with Illustrator. Let me know if you think there’s something missing though.
Something that has also been requested a lot is fields in the Inspector for the X and Y position of a layer and I’ve added that too now.

In all the feedback I’ve received people have asked quite often if I could add a way to make the Inspector visible at all times, and outside the view like a separate panel like Keynote’s Inspector.
As it turns out, this has been available since version 1.0, but maybe a bit too hidden. To keep the inspector open at all times simply drag it away from the current layer and it’ll be detached and stay at all times and automatically update to the current selection.

Another tip in the Inspector – and all other text fields – is that you can use the arrow up/down keys to increase/decrease a numeric value in it such as position or stroke width.

SVG Support

This update also improves SVG import significantly. SVG support is big thing to get right but I think we’re slowly getting there. The problem with SVG is that it’s such a liberal standard and there are a dozen ways to express something. This is quite annoying.

I believe path/polygon support in Sketch should be about right together with colors and gradients. Text layers are another challenge entirely and at the moment its support is limited to simple text strings. Since Sketch doesn’t support bitmap effects at all, these are obviously ignored, but quite rare in SVG anyway so that shouldn’t be a big problem.

I’m tempted to write a separate post about my gripes with SVG but let me just say that if you have an SVG file Sketch can’t open for you, I’d appreciate it if you could send it my way , and then I can take a look at it and hopefully get it to work properly.

Check for updates in the app to see the full release notes.

In case you haven’t seen the example files on Sketch yet, I encourage you to take a look: bohemiancoding.com/sketch/examples has quite lot of awesome user-submitted files created 100% in Sketch. I now realise I need a better page for the examples and I want to combine it together with the tutorials in one page that will be focussed on learning Sketch with videos, examples and tutorials. I hope to have more news on that soon.

Another novelty is that I’m slowly opening up Sketch for scriptability and plugins. I’ve chosen the awesome JSTalk scripting language, but more about that in the next post.