Qwikly 1.7-beta
Our latest version of Qwikly focuses on performance enhancements and introduces a sneak peek of our Components feature. Check out the full changelog and download a copy to try for free from our website.
We also have a 50% off sale going on right now and ending on July 16th (my birthday). Head over to our pricing page to purchase a license now to support our future development and unlock Qwikly Pro. If you act soon, you’ll get some extra time on your license, because we’re not starting the 12 month license period until we come out of beta!
Performance Enhancements
With this release, we really hammered down on some performance trouble spots in our Sketch plugin and our build system. To identify the problem areas, we first profiled (and profiled, and profiled some more…) our code to find any calls that were slowing down Sketch. Then, we looked for opportunities to speed up builds. I am happy to announce that we were able to achieve some serious performance gains with 1.7-beta. Hopefully, you will find builds completing faster and more reliably, all while experiencing as-fast-as-normal Sketch behavior with our plugin enabled.
There were many culprits, but one really rough spot we noticed involved shape layers with a lot of paths. Sometimes, these complex shapes would make builds take essentially forever to complete. With some strategic fixes to our code generators, we were able to reduce some builds that that took over 90 seconds to well under a second!
Awesome!
Components
First off, what are we calling Components? In Qwikly, a Component is any Sketch design layer that is not a basic image, text layer, or shape group layer. All of these “fundamental” layer types are relatively straightforward to convert into their counterparts on the iOS side: UIImageView, UILabel, and custom drawable UIViews using Core Graphics. But how can Qwikly know how to turn something in your Sketch design into a switch or slider? Enter Sketch’s symbols…
When you create a project from one of our three templates, it will come packaged with a very small set of Qwikly Component symbols. Since this is the first release, it’s bundled with just a few Component symbols to introduce this concept. We are really excited about how powerful Components can be, and we will be rolling out more robust support for them in future releases. There’s even talk of possibly supporting
’s awesome UX Power Tools in the future.We’ve achieved this by creating JSON mappings for our Sketch symbols and then updating our Sketch plugin to “do stuff” with them. In the future, we’d love to open up these systems so anyone can start creating mappings for their own components. We have a vision for a robust plugin system inside Qwikly, so this is just the beginning of our journey on components.
Take a look at adding a switch with custom on and off colors.
But now we can’t see the “off” color. That’s ok, all you have to do is change the color of the hidden “Off” layer in our symbol.
What’s Next?
Here are some of the things we’re working for the next few releases:
- Bug fixes and rendering improvements: Think rotation, flipped, masks, all font properties.
- More components: Tab Bars/Nav Bars, and support for nested symbols.
- Animation support through the awesome Kite Compositor app.
Also, after our Independence Day sale ends, we’ll be introducing a full-featured trial period, instead of the limited Qwikly Basic option we have now. You’ll get 14 days to try Qwikly with no restrictions. More on that to come…
Keep on rocking!
