Sketch 3.8 Brings New Mirror and More

Today’s update to Sketch brings a long-awaited update to Sketch Mirror, our iOS counterpart app for quickly viewing your designs on an iPhone or iPad.

The new Mirror has been rewritten from the ground up to be faster and more reliable. Most importantly, we’ve added support for connecting via USB. Simply plug in the cable, and that’s it! Sketch will connect and will start sending transfers immediately. We’ve also greatly improved the app’s speed and performance in this version with changes made in Sketch now arriving on your device in real-time.

Previously with Sketch Mirror, you could only connect via Wi-Fi, but because Wi-Fi connections rely on Bonjour discovery, this was something we discovered didn’t always work reliably. The reason being that many corporate networks block Bonjour altogether or have different networks for desktop and mobile devices. Now being unable to connect is a thing of the past, as long as you have a Lightning cable with you.

Not only have improvements been made to connectivity, the app now has a refreshed UI, and an improved experience — we’ve added an overview so you can browse all your Artboards over different pages faster than before! Mirror is now smarter, restoring your connection if you switch between apps on iOS, something that we know has been a bit of a pain point and have been glad to fix. Mirror is also now fully optimized for the iPad Pro, and has been updated to support iOS 9 features such as Split View and multitasking.

With this update, we took the opportunity to improve Local Sharing and make it part of Mirror. Previously, Local Sharing was a way to preview Sketch documents in your browser if you were on the same network. This was very similar to Mirror in spirit, so we took the logical step and merged the two. Now you can preview your Sketch document on any device — be it a phone, a tablet, a Windows PC, smart fridge or anything else with a browser. Browsers waiting for access to Mirror now appear in the popover like iOS devices running Mirror, where you can securely control access.

If you don’t have Sketch Mirror and want to check it out, you can download it here for free on the App Store, but please note that it requires Sketch 3.8 to connect. If you are running an earlier version of Sketch (3.7.2 or under) you will need to keep the current version of Mirror (1.4).

Sketch 3.8 also contains a number of improvements and bug fixes. Highlights include a major improvement to the reliability of undo, along with more fixes to SVG importing and exporting, as well as more performance enhancements.

Check out the full list of updates here. We hope you’ll download this free update, along with the new version of Mirror and see what’s new for yourself!

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any feedback, feature requests, or bug reports via our support page. You can also join the conversation on Twitter. Let’s continue to make Sketch better, together.