One solution is to fire the entire Design team and force the new one to use W10.

Have you tried Figma? Their import of Sketch files might solve some of your collaboration issues. I've been using Mac during my entire professional career, but if I was to switch to Windows I'd probably miss prototyping tools more than Sketch itself.

Yes to Sketch. Yes to Mac OSX.

If the majority of your colleagues are working with those constraints, then you should too.

Look at a repurposed Macbook Pro - the Retina 2012 range are kick-ass and you can pay to bulk them up a bit should you need that extra RAM/Storage etc. Don't need to have a super shiny (useless touch-bar) version.

Switch and don't look back. Then come back to this thread and thank us ;)

Figma

I switched my Mac for an Windows PC which I can actually upgrade instead of selling for shit when it becomes outdated. I think a good designer won't be limited by his tools, and Photoshop is the jack of all trades. With the introduction of multiple artboards in Photoshop, I can't think of another major reason to switch from PS to Sketch.

Put your money in a good display and use Figma if you want to work in a similar workflow. Remember, there's nothing you can do in Sketch that you can't do in Photoshop.

Spending $3k + to use a (buggy) piece of software?

Why not use Figma or Adobe XD?

I use mac, but always have. However, i sometimes wished I moved to PC. They're more customisable and more powerful and Windows is really upping the aesthetics game.

I'd disagree about Affinity Designer. It's like Sketch on steriods to me. I use Sketch and like it a lot but I find it's more of the "hip" tool to use these days. Everyone thinks it's the be-end-all solution when in reality it's just as limiting as Photoshop for Web Design but with different constraints.

Sure the plugins in Sketch are nice but the amount of bugs kills it for me. Typography is also a nightmare. Sketch updates so often that plugins become unmaintained and no longer work.

Sketch is a light weight app so it has that going for it but in return you'll still end up needing to edit images and raster graphics in another program. In Affinity....not so much. It's all possible within.

I'd suggest spending more time with Affinity Designer and I think you'll be pleased. It can do anything from illustration to UI design and was built to do so.

It's also only $50.

Using FIGMA on Windows 10 on MacBookPro

Easy as hell, Paper > Figma > Code = done!

I've said it before on DN, consider the hackintosh route if you're comfortable putting together a new machine. Some people like the assurance they get knowing Apple will fix their problems when they arise, for those who don't need that you're breaking the bank for no reason.

Just follow one of these guides (exactly) and you should be laughing: https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/march/2017

People say its not reliable, and maybe I got lucky with my build but I have yet to experience a single issue with my machine. It runs flawlessly, dual boots into Win or MacOs, is incredibly fast and saved me a ton of money when I was faced with a new Mac purchase. There's some tech know-how required to get it running but if you are relatively competent you should be fine.

That being said, don't be worried about learning how to use a Mac. It's the simplest thing in the world to do and really is a great environment to be work in.

You could potentially dual boot your Mac with Boot Camp and have both. However, with a PC you can't necessarily dual boot into MacOS (you could, but the Hackintosh thing never really works out perfectly IMO). You could run the Mac on Windows 10 for all personal things, restart and boot into MacOS when working. Or just purchase a Mac for work, keep a PC for play.

It will be a transition that's for sure. I have a MacBook Pro 15" for work and a built Windows 10 PC for gaming.

i did it 4 years ago, best decission i ever made. A thing that killed me was copy paste from everywhere to everywhere for example out of illstrator to keynote or powerpoit. in keynote for example vectors will stay vectors.

there are many things that take you way durther than on windows. and sketch is a totally different topic. i am 3 times faster in sketch than in Photoshop for example. you get a ton of plugins and other apps that will improve and speed up your workflow and design skills.

So? just do it!

If you're regularly working with people who use Sketch then it would make things easier for sure, in terms of collaboration. However, if you're productive and comfortable in a Windows environment there's no real need to switch. I don't think Sketch is by any means essential, it's just the zeitgeist.

Literally the worst time since the 90s to switch to mac.

• More expensive than ever
• Actively trying to kill real computers/OS X in favour for iPads (Don't believe my notice their current campaign isn't talking about Windows viruses/malware anymore but any laptop)
• Don't care about pro hardware

Just one word,"Yes"! However, I still prefer to have both of them. 90% of my work is done Mac because of Sketch. However, sometimes, you will deal with clients that tell you to use Photoshop/or slap you in the face with a 1 Gb .psd file and ask you to deal with it. Is those cases, having a good rig with Photoshop will be a great help.If you can only afford a medium range Mac, then keep your PC at a backup because IMO, Mac doesn't run smoothly w PTS.

If you're able to keep your windows machine while you purchase your Mac, you shouldn't be scared at all. I can understand the fear, however, if purchasing your Mac is contingent on selling your W10.

If you are a designer, that means you are computer literate. If you are computer literate, you shouldn't have any problems switching.

It's a personal taste thing. Anywhere you work, they'll provide a computer for you, and you'll be forced to use their ecosystem. This will most likely be a Mac ecosystem.

Honestly, you should.

MacOS is great in many ways. Organisation, productivity...etc. Also it's fairly easy to use I think, you'll find that a lot of thing make sense. Except for a few keyboard shortcuts.... you won't be spending a huge amount of time adapting to it.

I've been using Sketch for all design projects I've had, freelance, at the agency. Everything. It's the most solid tool for interface design and you should get started with it. Also the available plugins make your life a lot easier. The whole feels a lot more flexible than Photoshop or Illustrator. (I don't know about Figma, Affinity, nor Adobe XD, and honestly don't feel the need to go looking elsewhere...)

As for what Mac you should be getting, I think if you can get started with the older version of the Retina MacBook Pro, mine is from the mid-2012 and still doing everything just as good.

I hope this helps you. If you need anything else, don't hesitate to reach out. :) Cheers.

Well, I always recommend Mac for the reason that most of the nicest development software is done on OS X. Aside from this, the products are good in overall specially the Macbooks Pros. Microsoft is doing nice now in Hardware, but the OS is still in my opinion a bit dull.

Sketch is good, but there will be more coming that will dispute its throne.

yes

I started using Sketch professionally in December, after having used PS for UI design for over 10 years professionally.

I won't lie: there was growing pains and plenty of fear and doubt, but I literally cannot imagine going back to PS for anything other than photoshopping. (Even for that purpose, opening PS feels like pushing through a creaking door and wading through cobwebs.)

It's really that much of a difference for me. You'll find where vanilla Sketch may not align specifically for your workflow, the plugins fill the gap. Mind you, this is not some afterthought or shortcoming of Sketch, but rather a great strength in that it keeps core Sketch simple, while plugins add the necessary (but not required) complexity you might want.

I only bring this up because it's a completely different philosophy than I was used to with Adobe software and workflows, which has always been about being all things to all people, and thus, as of late, incredibly slow and far too complex (and I suspect a result of band-aiding it with UI features that designers actually need.)

Hey Ettore,

Making that kind of a switch is a huge financial and time commitment. You'll be learning a new program, you'll be learning a new operating system, you'll be learning a new workflow.

But I can 100% guarantee that it'll make your life easier. We've have a number of designers and developers make the switch and Sketch is essential. I made the switch about four years ago—after one day on Sketch, I've never done interface design in Photoshop/Illustrator again. As others have said, it was made for interface design from day one so it is demonstrably better.

To make your life better, these are the three links I send to my designers or my students when they are ready to start learning Sketch. Best of luck!

1) http://www.sketchcasts.net/episodes/introducing-sketch Great intro video to just show off how it is laid out and some core features

2) https://medium.com/@KounterB/sketch-tutorial_01-b76271a095e3 easy tutorial that will grow familiarity

3) http://www.sketchshortcuts.com/ Become an immediate power user

Yes.

The thing here is that affinity designer, Illustrator or photoshop are not originally made for UI design. Sketch is made for this which which gives you an advantage over the the other tools here.

In general I recommend to try out tools often to find the right tools for the job. So with OS: You have to try it out and then decide which OS supports your workflow better.

Personally I ended up using Win10 / MacOS / Ubuntu altogether on a regular basis, because there is no OS which fits it all.

And so the zeitgeist is: In the future there will be more tools which support all platforms trough the power of the web. You can give figma a shot to see a good example for such a multi-platform tool.

I have to agree with John about the Mac. I've been a Mac user since the Classic (20years ago?), and I've been extremely disappointed for the past 10 years regarding the Desktop computers. As a matter of fact I just got a new PC way more powerful than the top mac, and way less price.

Regarding Sketch, I am a user of it almost from the beginning, pretty happy with it but I don't think it should be a reason to switch to mac. There are a bunch of new incredible tools that can compete with Sketch hands down, and are compatible with PC; with advantage that if eventually you work with front end developers (which usually prefer PC)they can have as well that program.

Check out Gravity Designer, at the moment to me is the best UI, web design tool on the market, and it is free.

The simple fact is that Sketch is far easier and quicker for UI design than Photoshop. If this wasn't the case, then it would not have usurped Adobe as the tool of choice in a very short space of time. Yes there will be people who say I prefer this and I prefer that, but the majority voted with their time & money. I used Photoshop for about 8 years before switching and I never looked back. Photoshop is an image editor, using it for UI design was always a hack.

As for the new MacBook Pro, most of the negativity is around those USB-C ports and the loss of function keys where the touch bar is now. If you can live with that then it is still the best machine you can buy for design work (again if this wasn't the case then why would everybody buy one). Last year's machines are still powerhouses so you can pick one up for far less and it will still last for years, but if you don't get the max 16GB RAM you will probably regret it.

I see a lot of people advocating for beta software like Figma or XD. Personally I never liked Sketch, I always found it's too weak and messy and you are only trading one set of bugs for another, but to switch to state a web based tool is a viable alternative?

If the rest of the team uses Sketch, you should too, to make exchanging files and collaborating as easy as possible - no importing software will make up for that.

I was doing some freelance with a team of 6 people recently, working on a really really huge and complexe project. All of them were using the adobe CC solution. When the manager was able to get a budget in order to update their whole computer set-up. They did choose the mac and sketch combo (Yes, I did argue for them to do it). I was there to help them during the transition and gave them a 2h course/presentation of sketch.

The real pain was to setup the sharing library. It took us about 2 weeks to have something up-and running. We used a mix between craft shared library from invision and the native sketch templating feature running on the Creative cloud file sharing... It 's faaar from being perfect, some times the synch doesn't work, some time it mixes your changes with the original template, some other time it duplicate every single symbols. We rapidly began to keep a backup of every single step to finally we decide having a UI design shync meeting twice a week in order to decide what we will going to update inside the library. But when they saw the sketch nested symbols+constraints at work... Boy! Nobody wanted to use photoshop again.

Mac O.S is easy to use and if you have other user in your team you will never get stuck. Sketch is also really handy it will take you no more than few days to be familiar.

Money concerns appart you should to go for it.

Except If you have some SERIOUS graphic needs (like 3D or really heaving photoshop work) any macbook pro will work perfectly for UI work. Mine is the cheapest 15" model from 2013 and the only time I feel a real game changer on the performance is when I use my friend's war machine, built for 3d with 2 cpu, 2 Gpu and 64gig of ram.

i've asked every UX designer i know and they all say the same: buy Mac and use sketch if you are serious about design

Fwiw, I have the new Macbook Pro and have been loving it. But starting out you can get going much, much cheaper to see if MacOS is a good direction for you. If you have a monitor, you could start with a refurbished Mac Mini: http://www.apple.com/us-hed/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

I made the switch to Mac 8 years ago and used Mac and Windows side-by-side for a few months before switching completely. It felt like a big risk at the time and there was certainly a learning curve getting used to a new OS, but I haven't looked back. For me the value has little to do with the differences in operating systems and everything to do with the software available. Over the years that has ranged from screen recording software to front-end editors (MacRabbit Espresso!) to design and even stuff like rails/git/npm. The best way I can recommend evaluating your decision is to look at the software that's central to your daily work and base it on that. Good tools are worth the investment.

Of course as mentioned, you always have Affinity Designer and Figma. I will say though that once I started using Sketch alongside Photoshop in my workflow it didn't take very long at all till I went all in.

I'm curious to know if anyone still uses Photoshop. I haven't touched it in years. Infact I use Afters effects more than Photoshop

Every place I have worked in my 10+ year design career (10+ places, including freelance the past 3 yrs), every designer has used a mac. That may not always be the case, but adopting the tools of the trade that are in majority use certainly won't hurt you.

Yes

Worth it just for sketch!