Making Sketch better in version 50

Sketch 50 is here and this latest update is a little different from the last few. Rather than releasing a brand new feature, we’ve been listening to your feedback and working incredibly hard to improve your overall experience in Sketch. With that in mind, version 50 is all about making Sketch better for designers. Read on to find out what we’ve been up to.

50 is just a number

At Sketch we’ve never been fans of following the crowd. We don’t want to meet expectations, we want to exceed them and sometimes subvert them. That’s why all of our recent releases included big features like Libraries, Prototyping and exciting new updates to Sketch Cloud. And, that’s also why we wanted to do something different in Sketch 50.

We’re always listening to our community and to our users and we know that performance is important to you. Big, headline feature updates are exciting but sometimes what matters most is making everything a little bit better. That’s why we’re going back to basics with Sketch 50 to make some improvements under the hood. This has also allowed us to lay the ground work for further updates that should continue to improve performance across the app, in Sketch 51 and beyond.

A few of our favorite fixes

Sketch 50 includes a lot of exciting improvements and updates, but we’d be lying if we said we didn’t have a few favorites. Here’s a rundown of the fixes we’re most excited about in the latest version of Sketch.

We’re making some big and long-awaited changes around importing and exporting vector formats like PDF, EPS and SVG to and from Sketch. These include fixing a particularly frustrating bug that caused transparency in gradients to be ignored when you export your Sketch documents to PDF and also implementing some changes that mean gradient fills in PDF and EPS files are properly imported into Sketch.

We’re improving readability of Nested Symbol overrides by making them indented in the Inspector and only displaying each layer’s immediate parent layer, as opposed to multiple parents as we did previously. These changes should increase the legibility of the overrides panel and hopefully speed up your workflow a little.

In Sketch 50 when you drag-and-drop large images into Sketch the destination Artboard will now be highlighted in blue and your image will be automatically scaled to fit the Artboard you’re dragging it to. Don’t panic though, if you hold down the Option key, they’ll still be inserted at their original size.

We know a lot of you are working on super complex designs, with tons of Symbols and overrides so the latest update includes a number of improvements that should mean Sketch is faster and more responsive than ever, when you’re editing large or complex documents.

Sketch 50 also includes some small changes to snapping behaviour in the app and we have plans to make a lot more improvements here in future so keep your eyes peeled for more snapping goodness.

More to come

The latest update is full of bug fixes and performance upgrades that should make your experience better but don’t worry, Sketch 50 has also helped us lay the foundation for some big exciting features, coming very soon. We’ll be able to tell you more about those in our next blog post.

Over 100 other improvements and bug fixes

Yes, you read that correctly. We’ve taken your feedback and suggestions on board and made over 40 improvements and fixed more than 60 bugs since our last update. Here are some more highlights:

• Rulers can now be locked in place to avoid accidentally adjusting the origin of coordinates
• PDF documents are now imported as separate pages, each with their own artboard — dropping a multi-page PDF into the Canvas now inserts an artboard for each page
• We’ve improved the behaviour of the Join command when combining open paths
• The Sketch API has been expanded with support for Libraries and more
• Exportable layers now also show an export preview in the Inspector

You can find a full list of bug fixes and improvements on our updates page.

Sketch 50 is a free update for everyone with an active license. If you need to renew your license, you’ll get Sketch 50 and a whole year’s worth of updates after that.

Speaking of making improvements, we’d love to hear your opinions on the latest update so please let us know what you think! If you’ve got questions or feedback, you can get in touch with us via our support page or join the conversation on Twitter or Facebook.

We’re already working hard on Sketch 51 and we can’t wait to tell you all about it very soon.