I’m really excited today to share the news that our iOS 7 GUI template is going to ship natively in Sketch 3 (Sketch 2 shown above). No longer will you need to Google ‘iOS GUI Sketch’ and download the file from our site. You can just open Sketch 3, select our iOS 7 template and starting building out your next iOS app.

When Pieter Omvlee, the founder of Bohemian Coding, reached out asking if we would consider having it as part of the new release we were hesitant at first. For as long as we’ve offered the PSD we’ve been asked by other software developers to include versions of it in their software. We have said no to every one. So why are we saying yes to Bohemian Coding?

Growth in popularity

In recent years, I’ve seen a good deal of designers make the switch to Sketch. Khoi Vinh is one such designer. He recently wrote a post about his thoughts on the forthcoming version. He sums up what he likes about Sketch by saying:

(Sketch) combined the precision of a raster editing application like Photoshop with the versatility of a vector editing application like Illustrator, and it did so with all of the speed and nimbleness of a newly imagined, freshly written app, one free of the cruft that had been increasingly weighing down the dominant players in the graphics software market for years. Also, it was incredibly affordable.

More and more companies we work with have switched to using Sketch in their workflow, including Flipboard and Medium. One thing I’ve noticed about the people who use Sketch is that are all incredibly passionate and vocal about the making the switch. Cemre Güngör, design lead at Branch and now Facebook, made the switch awhile ago and cites this as one of the main reasons he made it:

Sketch’s rendering feels closest to the end result (fonts, etc). Photoshop’s output feels like an estimation.

I’ve heard some complaints about its stability, or that it just doesn’t do some things as well as Photoshop, but a recent tweet of mine asking who was using it elicited a ton of ‘yes’ replies from some very notable designs and companies. It’s clear, even from this, that a lot of people either look past any issues its current version has, or, use Sketch to compliment their workflow.

I’m writing a post for @teehanlax. Wondering who is now using Sketch over Photoshop most of the time? — Geoff Teehan (@gt) March 31, 2014

Learning a new trick takes time

It’s really hard to make a switch like this. After working with Photoshop and Illustrator for well over a decade, it can be incredibly frustrating to move slowly through something as simple as adding a mask element, purely because you haven’t done it before. It’s always difficult to learn new things, not because they are difficult, but because they are slow. Time isn’t always something you have a ton of when you’re cranking on that next product feature. Most of us here at Teehan+Lax are still using Photoshop, but we’ll all be putting Sketch 3 through its paces once publicly released. It’s important to us here that we take the time to assess and learn new things, even if they never become part of a final workflow.

Ultimately we believe that Sketch has a very bright future and we want to be part of shaping that future.

One big shout out is needed for our friend, Tyler Howarth. Tyler was actually responsible for porting over our PSD version of the file to Sketch. Thanks, Tyler.

We will of course still be supporting PhotoShop and continue to host all the versions of those files on our site.

If you’re interested in being notified when Sketch 3 becomes available, you can sign up here.