Auto-Align, Marked for Export and New Properties in the newest version of Fireblade for Adobe XD
Three months ago, the Fireblade plugin was released for free in the Adobe XD Plugin Manager. We were very excited about the first results and focused on user feedback since then.
After a few weeks of analyzing these feedback, we selected the suggestions that would have the greatest positive impact for a first release and worked hard on them.
Today we are very excited to announce the new features provided in the latest version of Fireblade, which is now available in the Adobe XD Plugin Manager.
Auto-Align
One of the main features of Fireblade is the possibility of working with a responsive alignment for the exported design. So we developed a feature that makes child elements automatically adapt to the parent element’s alignment.
Before demonstrating this new feature, note in the left side image that, by default, all elements start with the Auto-align feature unchecked and with the LEFT-TOP anchor alignment.
Please, observe the result of the default alignment (top-left) when we export the selected artboard using Fireblade plugin:
To see Auto-align feature in action, check the Auto-align option on the child elements:
Now change only the artboard alignment anchors to top-right-bottom-left as shown in the figure on the side.
The Fireblade plugin will display a window saying it is applying the new alignment definition.
While showing this window, the Fireblade plugin checks all the design layers for elements that are marked with the Auto-align feature, analyzes their position in relation to the position and alignment of the element parent and decides which alignment to apply to the element.
Note that automatically the children’s alignment anchors have been modified to follow the parent’s new anchor alignment:
See how the children’s alignment anchors change as the parent’s alignment anchors change:
Marked for Export
This new feature in the Fireblade plugin allows elements of types Rectangle, Group, Component and Repeat Grid, whenever marked with the option “Marked For Export” on the layer, to be exported as PNGs.
This possibility came to help users deal with features that are present in Adobe XD, but not yet supported by the Fireblade plugin due to current API limitations.
Below is an example of how to use this feature to export elements with the Background Blur effect:
New Properties
For all elements, the position property was made available. All basic interface elements were given the “name” property. Checkbox and Radio received the “checked” property. RadioGroup received the property “value”:
What else did we do?
In addition to the highlights already shown in this post, it is worth mentioning that several structural improvements were made, in addition to bug fixes. Access the changelog in our documentation for more details.
If you have not tried Fireblade yet, download the Fireblade plugin for Adobe XD and send us your feedback to support@fireblade.io. We really expect to handle all your feedback in the best way, maybe you will see your suggestions implemented in our next post.
