Sketch’s Open File Format
Jasim A Basheer (via Andy Matuschak):
“enables more powerful integrations for third-party developers” is stating it lightly. This is what the fine folks at Bohemian Coding has done — they opened up Sketch’s file format into a neat JSON making it possible for anyone to create and modify Sketch compatible files.
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Can you imagine what kind of new things will now be possible? One word: design automation (okay, two words!).You want Artboards that showcase a font and its variations, like a Google Fonts page? There’s probably going to be a script to generate that file. There will be websites from which you can download freshly brewed Sketch files based on what you ask — say an image gallery, or a landing page, or a signup form. You’ll be able to pick your brand colors, choose a theme, randomize it, and voila! you have a Sketch design to start playing with. Someone could even build a Sketch equivalent that runs on the browser. The possibilities are many!
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And Sketch itself comes with an in-built REPL where anyone can whip up a plugin in no time, and just hit Save to package it into a distributable plugin. There is nothing extra to do — it is all in the app. This makes it very easy for users of Sketch to get started with plugin development, and they happily take the bait!
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But I wanted to make a point with all this: even though plugin development is undocumented and painful, developers still build crazy useful things on top of it.
