The long-anticipated Sketch 42 update has arrived with Touch Bar support for the new MacBook Pro. Let’s take a look at how the Touch Bar, new export presets, and other enhancements keep your workflow blazing in Sketch 42.
1. Touch Bar support
The big news in this update is Touch Bar support for the 2016 MacBook Pro. If you’ve got one of these new machines, you’ll find that Sketch now presents you with a host of tools directly on the Touch Bar—as well as direct access to properties like fill and border. You’ll have quick access to document and global colors, plus a full-blown color picker with hue, saturation, brightness, and even opacity.
Related: Getting crazy with Rotate Copies in Sketch
2. Export presets
The next big thing is something that many of us have been eagerly anticipating. When you navigate to the Sketch preferences in Sketch 42, you’ll find a new tab called “presets.”
The presets tab allows you to create you own combination of sizes and file formats for exporting assets. For example, the iOS preset they’ve created for us will automatically export 3 PNG files at 1x, 2x, and 3x sizes. And it’ll slap on the appropriate suffixes to the file name. By clicking the radio button to the left of the preset name, we’re choosing to use this preset recipe every time we make an asset exportable.
Now we can close the preferences and select a couple layers. One click of the Export button at the bottom of the Inspector now yields us the full set of assets needed for an iOS app. Now we’re ready to open Craft Sync and sync this over to InVision so our developers can Inspect the design and grab the assets.
3. Vector editing enhancements
In other news, Sketch 42 also now lets us select a subpath when working with compound shapes and boolean operations—and hide it using the shortcut Shift + Command + H. This can really ease the pain when editing pieces of complex shapes.
Another welcome addition: the maximum zoom level has been increased by 4 times, allowing us to zoom in all the way to 25,600% for super precise pixel work. For those of you creating icons in Sketch, this is sure to make life a bit easier.
And if you’re using the vector tool to do so, you’ll be happy to find that now—when you come back around and click the first point—Sketch 42 will automatically close the path.
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Video Producer at InVision, former UI/UX designer of international in-flight entertainment, and avid automotive enthusiast.
