[seangp]

I run a design studio and some of our designers are big fans. We've unfortunately had to disable Anima across the team due to compatibility issues between designers who have created UIs with the help of your Sketch plugin and those who don't have the plugin installed.

The latter group often spend quite a bit of time fixing broken alignments etc when picking up a Sketch file that's used Anima. This means everyone is forced to install the plugin. The other issue then is when pushing to Zeplin, many elements aren't aligned as designed regardless of whether we've got your plugin enabled or not.

It doesn't happen every time, but it's happened enough times to warrant a studio-wide disabling of the plugin. I don't know if it's possible to easily solve this dependency issue in a future release, but if you can, we'll certainly start using it again.

[orarbel1]

The way our Auto-Layout plugin works is by hooking into the internals of Sketch and enforcing layout rules in real-time (i.e when the mouse moves). If someone doesn't have the plugin installed, the Sketch file can still be opened but they won't have the code that enforces the layout rules, so yes it will look and behave differently.

So while using Auto-Layout can save an enormous amount of time creating UI, it definitely needs to be used by all designers that work on the file.

In terms of exporting to other parties such as Zeplin, we have a feature that turns off all the layout rules just before exporting. If you have tried it out here it is: https://animaapp.github.io/docs/v1/launchpad/faq.html#Export...

And thank you for the kind words!

[seangp]

Thanks for the insight - that's good to know. If I remember correctly, the last time we looked into it, the solution for exporting was to detach all symbols. I wasn't aware of the feature you've mentioned. Will definitely give that a try!

[mockingbirdy]

Can you give some feedback about how good the output is?

We design very customized websites with complex layouts (box titles that are off-canvas etc).

I would love to reduce the amount of time that the developers need to realize a design. Our designers are usually much faster than the developers and they become the bottleneck in most projects. If the output is usable for production (and not a position:absolute nightmare), I would love to use something like this.

I don't care about incompatibilities with Zeplin and studio-wide usage as long as it has a good HTML and CSS quality (responsive, modular and clean).

OT: I like that the Yo app founder has a very short name, too. About Anima - would love to see you succeed! Would be happy to have such a tool.