Design Tools News #41

So, Sketch announced a few interesting and essential features last week! With Color Variables you finally get complete control over the colors in your entire design. Whether you use something for a fill, border, or a piece of text within a text layer, they can all be linked to a single color value, that you can name and organize. 🎨 Even if you use them in shared styles. ✨

Then, more importantly, Sketch now gets a full screen Components View, and an Insert Window to let you work with all your components properly🕵️‍♂️. You might think “Hey, that looks similar to what Runner does?!” — you’re not wrong… Check it out, curious to hear your thoughts…

The design+code team is at it again. With their updated web-based tool you can customize the style, colors and border of more than 5000 static & animated icons and illustration, and then export to React, SVG and Lottie code, or just PNG, PDF, or GIF. It also comes with Figma Libraries!

With Avocode you can centralize design collaboration, developer hand-off, version control, screen flows, & feedback in one tool. It auto-generates specs, image assets, and code from any design file. And more importantly, it works with Sketch, Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Figma designs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. So if you need flexibility like this, and work with lots of stakeholders across the entire product spectrum, definitely check out the new Avocode! 🥑

With the latest Noodl, a visual programming tool, you can deploy React products, rapidly integrate with APIs, model back-ends seamlessly with front-end development, and improve your workflow from concept to release. The cutting edge of React low-code.

I featured it before on this list (and hosted an internal workshop on it at IXDS), but lots has changed in the meantime, and if this model clicks with you, it’s a winner! There is a kind and growing community of Noodlers to help you out at any point, which is great for learning a new paradigm like this.

Easy does it. With Hustl you have one button to start a screen capture, and at the end it automatically turns it into a time-lapse. You know, great for demoing that sweet illustration you worked on, or summarize your coding side project. No need for editing or speeding up the video.

A new todo app that works across your Apple devices and focuses on smart ways of working with the keyboard and gestures. It definitely took some inspiration from Clear, but that’s not a bad thing. With Magnetic you can complete, delete, schedule, reschedule and move tasks in bulk, all with hotkeys and gestures.

Some people just love native apps, up to a point they don’t want to deal with other interfaces. If this sounds a bit like you, and you use Gmail, sign up for Mimestream! It combines your favorite Gmail features with the power of a native macOS app so you can move through your email effortlessly and keep your inbox organized with confidence.

One thing that’s often overlooked, or taken as an afterthought, is creating all the proper favicons and app icons for your website or app. Iconpie makes it easy to generate them in 50 different sizes. Just drop an image, and download the set! If you prefer a native macOS solution, there is also Store Assets Generator.