Many serious UI designers use the Mac Sketch app to design their screens but have to resort to 3rd party tools in order to show animated previews. The Diya plugin renders animations inside Sketch & can save you a lot of time & effort.
The aim of the plugin is to bring timeline animation directly to Sketch. With it you can animate designs & preview them right away, without ever having to leave Sketch.
Diya is being developed by Chennai, India-based founder Suresh V. Selvaraj. As he states elsewhere, designers typically finish projects in Sketch & have to resort to exporting the designs to a prototyping tool to show to interested parties. But these days animations are an integral part of the design process.
The plugin consists of a timeline editor that gives you a great deal of control over showcasing your designs. You can do a live preview of your designs & try out your animations directly in Sketch.
When you’re done you can share your animated prototypes with collaborators or clients by using the HTML export feature & hand off ‘live’ animation specs to developers. You can play with your animations inside Sketch or on any device.
According to Selvaraj the plugin uses the Action API in Sketch, which lets you hook into user events, so that when a layer changes, the plugin code knows about it. The plugin’s data is saved as JSON directly into the Sketch document with the new file format. Diya is developed in Xcode & loading frameworks, which allows for using “proper debugging tools rather than using JS/CocoaScript.”
Selvaraj is known for another popular prototyping tool called ‘Mitya’ which was released a few years ago & is aimed at building rich interactions by using “desktop events or touch-based gestures to create rich experiences.”
Diya is still under development but really promises to be a great aid for designers. You can sign up on the product page by leaving your email address & you’ll be contacted when the plug-in is available.
– This is a startup profile based on publicly available material & not a review –
Image Credit: Diya
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