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Flinto 1.3 With Re-Importing from Sketch(blog.flinto.com)

almost 8 years ago from Nathan Manousos, Designer of Flinto

  • Harper Lieblich, almost 8 years ago

    Well, giving Flinto another shot ended rather abruptly. I remembered the #2 reason for dismissing Flinto was the poor support for popovers, dropdowns, and modals.

    The Flinto team explains their reasoning as an attempt to make sure "you can never reach a state that you didn't explicitly design."

    What that means is if you want a modal or menu that appears in multiple screens, you have to build multiple versions for that modal or menu. The transitions you build also won't respect scroll state either.

    The folks at Flinto insist that this "prevents any kind of programming logic and bugs from entering into your prototypes". Having used InVision's solution to this problem extensively, I haven't run into any of the "programming logic" or "bugs" mentioned. Which is why I'll be sticking with InVision for now.

    To the team at Flinto: you've got an awesome looking product. I love the speed & stability that a native Mac app provides. The ability to quickly string together a number of screens feels great. I hope you keep on truckin, cause I think you're headed in the right direction.

    0 points
    • Nathan ManousosNathan Manousos, almost 8 years ago (edited almost 8 years ago )

      Thanks for the feedback, we can improve in this area. Overlaid content is one thing, and the simple case can be solved, but there are always questions about whether a transition out of an overlay screen should behave the same regardless of the content underneath. Easy enough for completely modal views, but if they aren't, then often you want the content below to be part of the transition and that means your transition has to account for any number of combined screens (overlay + background).

      Trouble also comes when you want to represent multiple "stateful" elements in one screen. Allowing that pretty much requires programming logic and the possibility of bugs.

      We provide some great tools to make seamless transitions between separate screens that feel like they are all happening within one screen. For example, it is possible to share scroll position between screens as you mentioned, using our connected layer feature. Connected scroll groups will share scroll position through transitions. This allows for some transitions that really sell the illusion that they are happening within one screen, even though they aren't. It's the best of both worlds.

      If you have a specific transition or interaction you are wondering about, let me know (hello@flinto.com) and I'll show you how to do it.

      2 points