37 comments

  • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago

    Hey DN friends, quick note: we just pushed some updates to Craft Library this morning highly focused on fixes and new features that came directly from community feedback (thank you!). These include:

    • Multi-symbol updates, including ability to send multiple symbols to Library for team-wide collaboration

    • Better support for symbol overrides when syncing library

    • Thumbnail hover previews to see important details (click and hold)

    • Background preview options for easier searching and scanning (great for being able to see lighter assets or ones with large amounts of transparency)

    • Color picker to more easily choose the colors you want to add to Library

    • Smarter search that enables sorting by type, color, category, and groups

    Anything else you want to see? Hit us up here or ping me directly stephen[at]invisionapp.com. Excited to continue sharing more with you on the Craft front in coming weeks. :)

    9 points
    • Matt GalliganMatt Galligan, over 6 years ago

      Nice update Stephen! Any plans to support library versioning? That way when you have to go back to an older file and make adjustments you're able to use the symbols, colors, etc. that were relevant for that time?

      4 points
      • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago

        Hey Matt- like where your head is at here. Going to add this to our feature request list for review. All of the above came from similar requests. :) I can see how this would be helpful in the given scenario so that you're not accidentally updating historical versions via an errant push on library where the same symbols are used. Hit me up at stephen[at]invisionapp.com if you have more info here. I'd be interested in finding out how frequently you end up full-on opening past versions vs finder preview for quick look, etc. Rocking feedback!

        0 points
        • Matt FeltenMatt Felten, 6 years ago

          I'm also very interested for versioning support. That's a feature of Brand.ai that I really like.

          An example, when a company goes through a brand update, a lot of the library will probably change. If a designer is working on a product feature at the same time, having to update their design midway through their process becomes a workflow challenge. It would be better to let them decide when to do that on their own terms to not pull out of the flow.

          Also, if the version is document-dependent, we'd still have artifacts of exactly what the design spec was at the time.

          0 points
    • Leanne Gunn, over 6 years ago

      Hi Stephen, thank you for being so involved on this board, it's helpful as I have searched high and low on the InVision help center and get no where.

      Can you elaborate on "Better support for symbol overrides when syncing library?" I am not having much luck with symbol overrides (for nested symbols), period. I even added all of the nested symbols into the library itself in hopes that it would find them there, but still no luck. This pretty much breaks the organization my team has for our symbol library. Will there be any update on this?

      0 points
      • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago

        Hey Leanne- apologies for delay, somehow I missed seeing this one. Sure thing I can elaborate!

        Symbol overrides now work correctly for regular symbols, however you are correct, nested symbols are not yet supported. Prior to this release we had a behavior thought caused overrides on regular symbols (not nested) to get overwritten during certain sync procedures. We're getting there step by step and hope to have support for nested symbols in the future. They're a little bit trickier given the different abstraction used to house them. That said this is something we all want. Hang in there and we'll keep cracking at it!

        0 points
  • Chris KeithChris Keith, over 6 years ago

    I wish I could get excited about this. For weeks now, exportable assets within symbols are not recognized in Inspect (known bug on your end, support has no answers for me). My team is pushing me to move to Zeplin.

    4 points
    • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago

      Hey Chris- let me do some digging on this- I'd like to directly connect you to the PM in charge of this area for convo. Can you hit me up at stephen[at]invisionapp.com and let's get chatting (can set up a call). Want to make life better here for you- lets see what we can do.

      1 point
    • Jeffrey KamJeffrey Kam, over 6 years ago

      Yep :/

      0 points
    • Miguel Solorio, over 6 years ago

      +1, the lack of support for nested symbols affects the rest of the features of Craft (Inspect, Library, etc.)

      2 points
  • Henrique NogueiraHenrique Nogueira, over 6 years ago

    Hey Stephen, i have a little problem with the libraries. Our team is trying to set a design system using the craft libraries and symbols overrides. But it always requires us to drag all of the children symbols. We need to drag just the button symbol, for example, and it should understand and add automatically the children symbols (different backgrounds, text colors, etc).

    2 points
    • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago

      Hey Henrique- shoot me an email at stephen[at]invisionapp.com. I want to find out more context here. Any screenshots or screen recordings of what you want to accomplish here are super appreciated (thought not required) so I can understand the intent fully and up level this to the product team accordingly- THANKS!

      1 point
    • Miguel Solorio, over 6 years ago

      +1 to this. Brand.ai does this really well. A great example of this is a button symbol with a nested symbols. When you add the button symbol to Craft, it doesn't recognize the nested symbols associated with the override in the symbol. If you want to change the icon, here's what the original file shows vs what Craft shows.

      1 point
      • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago

        Thanks Miguel very helpful. Have definitely +1'ed this to product team. Better support for nested symbols is on the roadmap.

        1 point
  • Miguel Solorio, over 6 years ago

    Has there been any performance improvements for large libraries? Today I'm testing out the new release and the moment I get to +20 symbols in my library it starts to slow down and lock up Sketch whenever I add new symbols. Makes it very unsuable.

    1 point
  • Aubree DeHaan, 6 years ago

    I may be missing something, but does Library accommodate changes in symbol sizes? I've been pulling an updated symbol thats size has been adjusted, and Library will duplicate the symbol and I then have to delete the previous symbol and replace.

    Is there a better way of doing this?

    0 points
  • Solene T., over 6 years ago

    Hi! First of all, thanks for the Craft suite of plugins. Very useful :)

    I'm currently working to release Library to my team but there's a point I'm not sure about. When I edit/delete/add a symbol, the "Push change" button doesn't always become active. Moreover, when experiencing with a coworker, when I edit/delete/add a symbol, it is automatically pushed without any action from me. Same for the texte styles and colors. Is it how it is supposed to work? What is the use for the push change button?

    Another question: How do you cut the link between a symbol taken in a library and the library. In case you want to make some changes without impacting the library?

    Thanks

    0 points
  • Wang Jing, over 6 years ago

    a problem is...................

    0 points
  • Miguel Solorio, over 6 years ago

    Great update! Is there still no way to automatically sort items in a group? Typically what happens in our workflow is we have a list of icons we added, we have new ones that get created and we add them to the Library but Craft sorts it by last added. It would be great to have a "Sort in ascending order" option. It becomes a pain when there are a lot of new items and we have to manually sort the list.

    0 points
    • Tim Dose, over 6 years ago

      Yes, you can sort the items in a group. You could actually do it in the old version but it was kind of unintuitive.

      To sort items in the new release, just click the little pencil/box icon at bottom right. That'll put you in a mode where you can edit the library. Once in that mode, you can drag and drop to reorder items. You can also drop items on top of each other to create a subgroup. Also, you can rename and delete items in this mode. Click the pencil icon again to get out of edit mode.

      Hope this helps!

      0 points
  • Tim Dose, over 6 years ago

    Hi Stephen!

    First off, let me say thank you for all the amazing tools you guys are working on. They're really taking Sketch to the next level.

    I've been experimenting with Library in the past couple weeks and will be releasing a pilot to the team soon. I'm pretty excited. A couple questions on this release:

    • I can't seem to figure out how to update a library item. In the previous version it was almost too easy to update an item. Now I can't even find it. Am I missing something?
    • Can you only make symbol items now? Before I had the option of making library items from symbols or groups. In a lot of ways I preferred groups.
    0 points
    • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago

      Hey Tim- thanks for the kind comments- much appreciated. Few answers for you: you are correct symbols is the way to do it now. This ensures that things like symbol overrides are preserved and affords a format that is more flexible/scalable vs groups. For updating, make changes to the symbol, return to your document and with the item selected hit 'push changes' in the library panel. If you're still having any issues hit us up at support@invisionapp.com and we'll get you taken care of. Thanks!

      0 points
  • Tim Knight, over 6 years ago

    Glad to see Library getting some love!

    I know one place I've struggled with Library in the past is that, if I'm done working on a particular project where I don't need to load that library anymore there isn't a way to unload that library without creating and loading another one first. I just tried the update and see that's still how it is.

    Any plans to allow people to unload a library if they only are connected to one, Stephen?

    0 points
    • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago

      Hey Tim- super interesting scenario you raise here. Right now libraries exist separately from working files relationships. This is purposeful to the extent that you may have multiple files that are benefitting from the same library. The assumption being that in many cases you wouldn't want to the two linked at the hip. That said, its an interesting concept you raise regarding associating a library to a given file to load/unload accordingly. Thx for the suggestion- will run it by the team.

      0 points
      • Tim Knight, over 6 years ago

        Hey Stephen, thanks for listening to the feedback. Not fully where I was going though. What I mean is, if you connect to a single library to Craft regardless of file, there isn't a convenient way to remove it.

        0 points
  • Piero BorgoPiero Borgo, over 6 years ago

    Kinda disappointed by this update, why are artboards not supported? Basically all the elements I have in the craft library are artboards, now they all have been converted to symbols :(

    0 points
  • Kai Pham, over 6 years ago

    Very nice.

    0 points
  • Sumul Shah, over 6 years ago

    Awesome! Had a bit of friction updating my old Library (most groups had stuff out of order), but it's totally worth it to have text styles support everything that Sketch's text styles support. Previously, Library's text styles didn't support character spacing, baseline shift, and other text fine tuning options. Now it does.

    0 points
    • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago

      Sweet- thanks for the feedback Sumul! Agreed- nice to have a much more symbol-centric focus as well with better affordance for overrides to boot. Glad you stumbled upon those text style updates as well. :)

      0 points