A redesigned color popover, better plugin management and more in Sketch 45

Sketch 45 is here, and with it, we’ve improved a few core features that we hope you’ll love. Our biggest update is to the way Sketch handles plugin updates and incompatible plugins. We’ve also improved the color popover, presentation mode and more. Here are the headline features in Sketch 45:

• Plugins now update automatically within Sketch and we’ll disable incompatible plugins so they don’t break Sketch
• The color popover now scrolls and the color picker is now collapsible
• We’ve made some useful improvements to snapping in the vector editor
• Over 50 other improvements and bug fixes, including keyboard shortcuts to nudge layers and an updated presentation mode

Better Plugin management

We move fast, and so does our excellent developer community. That’s awesome, but it means a lot of manual plugin updates. On some occasions, an older plugin might not be compatible with a new version of Sketch, which causes even more issues. With Sketch 45, we’ve taken some steps to fix this.

Updating plugins manually is a pain. You have to find the website of each plugin and work out if a newer version is available. Some plugins have their own update mechanism, and there are some cool third-party plugin managers, but we thought it’d be helpful to make this experience easier and more consistent. Now, automatic plugin updates are natively supported in Sketch.

If it looks like a plugin update isn’t compatible with the latest version of Sketch, we’ll disable that plugin so it doesn’t break things. Once a compatible update is available, we’ll let you know and ask if you’d like to install it. We’ve also fixed it so plugins are immediately removed from the Plugins menu if you disable them.

An improved color popover UI

When you’re working within a document with an extensive style guide behind it, chances are you’ve got a set of color presets. With Sketch 45, we’ve made some updates to the color popover for people like you.

Specifically, the popover now scrolls if you’ve got a lot of color presets saved. In other words, it won’t disappear off the bottom of your screen. Better still, if you’re one of those people with lots of color presets, you likely don’t need the color picker too often, so we’ve made it collapsible.

Improved snapping in the vector editor

Drawing perfect and precise shapes can be slow when you have to place a point in an arbitrary position and then carefully line it up with existing points. In Sketch 45, smart guides now appear when hovering over a shape’s x or y coordinates to help you place your next vector point. It’s another change that we hope will make your life easier and our vector tools more powerful.

More consistent menus

With Sketch 45, we’ve moved a few menu items to make things more consistent and make way for new items coming soon. We thought we’d flag this one just in case you’ve got any custom keyboard shortcuts set up. Don’t worry, your favorite menu item is still around, it just has a new home (or possibly a new name) now.

Over 50 changes, improvements and bug fixes

Once again, we’ve made a number of smaller improvements to Sketch based on your feedback, as well as some essential bug fixes. Here are the highlights:

• You choose how far layers are nudged by the arrow keys or Shift-arrow keys in Preferences
• Presentation mode has been redesigned to simply hide the UI and not enter Full Screen (it also now works with tabbed windows)
• We’ve added a preference to choose between selecting a point, or closing a path, when clicking the first point in the vector editor
• Layer resizing constraints now have their own shortcuts (you’ll find those under Layer > Constraints menu)

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

Sketch 45 is a free update for everyone with an active license. If you need to renew your license, you’ll get Sketch 45 and a whole year’s worth of updates after that.

Do let us know what you think of this update — we’d love to hear from you. If you’ve got questions or feedback, you can get in touch with us visa our support page or join in the conversation on Twitter.

Next up is Sketch 46 — we’re working hard on it and will have more news soon.