Some of you also submitted bugs or blogged about the issues that Sketch 2.0 still has and we’ve been working hard to address those. After all, bugs are instantly found as soon as an app is out in the wild, no matter how much beta testing is done before launching.

The good news is that Sketch 2.0.1 has just been submitted to the App Store for approval and when thats approved we’ll release it to our customers outside the store as well.

The 2.0.1 update fixes a few bugs and improves the rendering of various styles attributes. Gradient banding should be a thing of the past. Noise should look a lot sharper. Inner and outer glow have been completely rewritten to look a lot better. Last but not least, inner shadows now no longer show any artifacts around the edge of the shape.
Working with bitmap-based styles (glow, blur and inner shadow) is now also a lot faster. If you gave Sketch a try but were turned down by any of the above rendering issues, we invite you to try the app again.
A full changelog can be seen below.

future

We also thought we should take this occasion to outline our future plans for Sketch. We always knew that the 2.0 was just a first step, and we have many more things we want to do for which there just was no time in this first release. 2.0 was intended as a solid base and contain the essential features people expect.

The feature requests we have received have mostly focussed on three things:
- Symbols, or some way to reuse layers in a document
- Just like we have multiple fills, support multiple borders, shadows etc too.
- Better EPS importing

We had always intended to tackle these first and we’re happy our users agree here.

change log

Rendering

- Improves the quality of the Inner and Outer Glow styles
- Greatly improves the rendering quality of Inner Shadows
- Improves the sharpness of the Noise style
- Improves the quality of gradients by removing banding
- Improves compatibility with documents created with Sketch 1.x
- Improves the accuracy of vectors on small sizes
- Improves the accuracy of boolean operations
- Fixes possible clipping issues for outer glows

Improvements

- Greatly improves the performance of layers with bitmap-based styles such as blur and glow
- Inserting new layers and now snaps them to the Grid
- Vector points now snap to the Grid as well
Improves working with the marquee tool in deeply nested groups
- Improves the accuracy of selecting objects in deeply nested groups
- Improves SVG importing
- Improves the quality of Quicklook previews

Bugfixes

- Fixes an issue with PDF-export on layers with multiple fills
- Fixes a potential crasher when changing text color
- Text inspector now properly works with subranges of text
- Fixes a refresh issue with Artboards & the Grid
- Align items in the contextual menu are now working again
- Fixes a few inaccuracies in the ‘Copy CSS’ option
- Fixes a potential crashing issue with empty shapes

Sketch 2.0 started when the very talented designer Emanuel Sá joined Bohemian Coding. Together we wanted to make a graphics app that could replace Photoshop for him, and I’m happy to say it has. We hope it can do the same for you.

If you’ve used Sketch 1.x in the past, then you’ll immediately notice how Sketch 2.0 is nothing like the old version. The interface is completely different. There are no popovers or annoying floating panels anymore. Everything is one window. But you will also notice that 2.0 is way more powerful and yet easier to use than 1.x ever was.

We’re working on tutorials and screencasts and we hope to have a good selection ready soon. We encourage you to download the free trial and watch the introduction video inside the app to see how easy it is to make something awesome.

Future Plans

Sketch 2.0 has what we consider to be the minimum required feature-set for a professional graphics app. We intend to release new features with regular 2.x updates. If Sketch in its current form isn’t quite what you need, please let us know and maybe we can satisfy you in a future update.

From Sketch 1.x

If you bought Sketch 1.x on the App Store, Sketch 2.0 is a free upgrade there. If you bought Sketch on our own store, check the in-app updater, version 2.0 will be available there too for free.

From DrawIt

DrawIt is as you probably know, discontinued. Sketch 2.0 is the result of merging the two into a single app.

If you bought DrawIt on our own store before January 2011, and wish to cross-upgrade to Sketch we have a special upgrade price for just $19. Please see the in-app updater in DrawIt for more details. If you bought DrawIt after that date please contact us (at mail@bohemiancoding.com) and we’ll give you a free license key for version 2.0.

If you bought DrawIt on the Mac App Store in the brief period it was available there, contact us and we’ll get you a free license key for version 2.0.

We wanted to provide a real alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop or Fireworks and we believe we have succeeded. It’s an ambitious goal for sure but if you’ve been using Photoshop’s vector capabilities combined with Layer Styles, we think we may have something better.

If you want to be informed when Sketch 2.0 launches please go to bohemiancoding.com/sketch2 and subscribe to the newsletter.

I won’t go into detail on new features yet. We’ll save that for a future post. But to prove that it’s a seriously powerful tool we made the application icon and the surrounding graphic on the teaser page using only Sketch.

We will announce plans for upgrades & pricing at a later date. For now I encourage you to visit the teaser page and subscribe to the newsletter.

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.