Happy 2017! We hope it’ll be a great year for you. 🎉 At Sketch we’re looking forward to unveil a long list of great updates throughout the year. We’re starting off with a nice set of improvements in Sketch 42.

Introducing Export Presets

In a world dominated by screens, there are so many resolutions and pixel densities to account for. Take the iPhone for example — just over 10 years ago, the device that put a computer into millions of pockets had 163 pixels per inch. Today devices exist with two, three or four times that density. Designers have to deal with creating assets that look stunning no matter the device they’re being used on. This update to Sketch will make it easier to account for this situation.

Sketch has long had the ability to apply multiple export scales to slices and exportable layers. This convenient feature allows you to take any part of your design, and export it to multiple sizes and filetypes, all from a single object. However, this was a little repetitive. You had to re-create the same list of sizes and filetypes for each layer you wanted to export. Sketch 42 makes this much easier by allowing you to create a preset list containing your export settings, which can be applied instantly to any layer you want.

To account for cases in your design where you may want to export something a little differently, simply swap the layer’s export preset to something else pre-defined — or add and remove scales as you would previously.

In designing the export preset feature, we addressed an issue requested by those designing for Android devices. The ability to apply prefixes, instead of suffixes to your export scales. 🌈

To change between applying a suffix and a prefix, just click the drop down arrow in the text field, and choose your preferred option. Anything typed before the ellipsis (…) will be applied before your layer’s name, whilst typing after it will appear at the end, before the extension.

Touch Bar Support

If you were watching Apple’s October Event in which they announced the latest addition to their line of MacBooks, you may have noticed Sketch mentioned as one of the apps to support the new Touch Bar. For those of you who have a new MacBook Pro, you can now use it with the latest version of Sketch!

Depending on what you’re doing in the app, the Touch Bar will display controls and shortcuts that are relevant to that particular context. For example, when you don’t have any layers selected, Sketch will display the Insert context so you can quickly make your next move. Simply tap on the tool of the layer you want to insert and begin drawing.

With a shape layer selected, the Touch Bar gives you an overview of your selected layer’s style, as well as allowing you to quickly access its properties to edit the layer, such as adjusting its fill right from the keyboard.

We think that this is just the start for the Touch Bar in Sketch. If you are lucky enough to own a new MacBook Pro, please let us know how you’re using it, and what you’d like to see us add by getting in touch!

Other Improvements

As always, we’ve continued to make further improvements and additions in response to your ever-amazing feedback. Some highlights include:

The zoom limit has been increased, allowing you to zoom in 25600% to allow more precise pixel work

SVG importing and exporting have been improved

When editing vector shapes, clicking the first point will now close the open path

Math operators now work in the radius field for rectangles. The semicolon (;) is now the character used to apply differing radii (40;0;40;0)

Editing complex Symbol instances in large documents is now smoother

Sub-paths can now be hidden so they are excluded from boolean operations

Many more bug fixes and stability improvements

We hope you’ll download this free update, and check out all that’s new for yourself! Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us via our support page, or join the conversation on Twitter, or our Facebook group. We’re excited to share what 2017 will bring, along with news about our next update!