Sympli — Mobile App Development Collaboration on Steroids
As a digital agency specialized in mobile solutions we strive to and for sure have to stay on top of the game always looking into technical innovations such as new tools.
These days Mahmoud Galal — one of our Android engineers — posted a slick and highly interesting new tool in our #whatshot Slack channel. Its name is Sympli and it aims to help and optimize the workflow between designers and developers as a collaboration platform with extensive support for Xcode, Android Studio, Sketch and Photoshop.
First impression made me instantly think “another Zeplin” — that’s the tool we really do not want to miss and gets used in all our Android and iOS projects without exceptions — but second thought taught me better already. Why? Cause I got pleasantly surprised seeing damn cool looking Android Studio and Xcode plugins. By that I mean design specification integrated into your development IDE, design and implemented UI side by side.
One that seems to be a killer feature is the possibility to reference design elements by just drag- & dropping it onto the real UI. The moment the link is created, all or most of the specified visual style including relative position to the parent is getting applied to the UI. And did I mention fully automatic asset synchronisation?
If that’s not enough, part of our mobile iOS unit at Modeso will deal with Sympli in detail working with it on a project the upcoming weeks. As soon as we think we caught enough useful insights and can make up our minds about it, I’ll complement this post with pros and cons.
Until then you have to be patient or check it out on your own. I would be glad to hear your opinions about Sympli!
Check out the screencasts on sympli.io or just try it out.
Update
As promised I am following up with first-handed and unaltered personal conclusions from our iOS and Android engineers in no specific order.
Positive
- Applying colors, setting width, height and origins has never been easier
- Adding annotations at positions for comments
- Assets, colors & fonts importing in Android Studio is very easy — now with just one click everything is adopted
- With AutoSync any update in design is reflected immediately without reload
- “Generate Styling code” is also an amazing feature allowing you creating custom TextViews without typing a single line of code
- They are very responsive in their live chat
Negative
- There is a bug where there is no horizontal scrolling in Xcode (on mac mini and no trackpad only) when Sympli is zoomed which also results in layout data information to overlap
- Installing updates of Xcode plugin causes the IDE to crash several times before becoming stable (reported)
- No scaling if design canvas size is different than storyboard canvas size
- No scrolling in Xcode when Sympli is zoomed
- No editing of annotations
- There is a bug regarding the sync of fonts between the website project and the plugin in the Android Studio
- The plugin in android studio got glitches for example we can’t use the color picker
Although the second list isn’t short, these are all relatively small issues that will get fixed or optimized in short-term for sure.
Conclusion
Our final conclusion for now is a clear recommendation to check out Sympli and start integrating it into your development workflow, if you can live with some glitches here and there. Independent of that, every developer should have it on his radar because it has huge potential to make life much easier, if it doesn’t yet.
Thanks go out to our dedicated mobile engineers Belal Mohamed, Mahmoud Abd El Fattah Galal, Mohammed Elsammak & Olla Ashour.
