The official blog of Sketch, the Mac interface design app, announcing releases, pricing changes, and company news.
HN commenters use it to check facts on Sketch's subscription licensing, funding, and performance improvements such as Metal acceleration.
Oh damn it. Sketch 3 owner, this is news to me. As a hobbyist, their subscription price will almost certainly not be worth it.
The reason I quit Adobe and bought Sketch was to support software that I could actually buy. Not this "Good deal for professionals, even cheaper for students, fuck anybody who just wants to use a decent art program every couple of months" model.
I'll see what I can track down on details, but I'm preemptively very disappointed about this.
EDIT: Sketch is _NOT_ switching to a subscription model. Sketch is breaking from the "paid major, free minor" upgrade schedule, and going to "rolling releases, $99 buys the app and a year of upgrades."
Personally I think that's a fair system. It frees them from having to plan new features around the major/minor release schedule, but you can still buy the software and just keep using it.
My biggest concern is going to be OS compatibility. With OS X on a yearly upgrade treadmill, if there are any compatibility issues (and there almost always are), then the Sketch upgrade is effectively not optional. That's not so different from how it is now, except there have only been two major upgrades since the original release (September 2010), so you'll be buying OS compatibility fixes more than twice as often. So I still don't love it.
https://blog.sketchapp.com/versioning-licensing-and-sketch-4-0-8ad98783e9ba
OP said "these apps" in reply to an article that mostly talks about apps that aren't possible (or would become extremely clumsy to use) through the MAS (VLC[0], uTorrent[1], Hopper, Sequel Pro, Sketch[1])
A lot of apps violate the MAS limitations in ways people don't realise. There are people in this thread claiming that VLC would fit within the MAS model even though it can't (at least not without ditching a lot of features).
Even if an app fits inside the limitations today, it may not in the future, and migrating away from the MAS is a huge hassle. It's also possible for the limitations to change so apps that are allowed now may not be in the future meaning those apps can't be updated at all, which is something that has already happened.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7039737
[1] as far as I know torrent apps are banned from the store
[2] http://blog.sketchapp.com/post/134322691555/leaving-the-mac-app-store
I respectfully disagree, at least that you can't generalize this to all software. For many products, incentives are better aligned for both the customer and the business if usage is based on an ongoing subscription. There are plenty of people who have spelled this out, but the recent switch of Ulysses (word processor) to subscription was one of the nicest explanations I've seen [1]. Sketch App also explained this when they made the switch, though perhaps not as eloquently [2].
[1]: https://medium.com/building-ulysses/why-were-switching-ulysses-to-subscription-47f80b07a9cd
[2]: https://blog.sketchapp.com/versioning-licensing-and-sketch-4-0-8ad98783e9ba
Looks like this landed in October 2018: https://blog.sketchapp.com/dark-mode-data-a-brand-new-look-and-more-in-sketch-52-e462c8a64d00 There are indeed significant performance improvements.
"Now running on Metal and with a brand new tiling system for the Canvas, Sketch performs better than ever when moving, resizing and manipulating layers in a large or complex document — up to 2.7x faster than Sketch 51!"
The most recent version of Sketch (52) seems to resolve a lot of the general slowness around large files. It's Metal-accelerated now.
https://blog.sketchapp.com/dark-mode-data-a-brand-new-look-and-more-in-sketch-52-e462c8a64d00
But… they already did? In 2016 no less [1]. That $100 buys you exactly 1 year of updates. After that you have to renew at $69 per year.
[1]: https://blog.sketchapp.com/versioning-licensing-and-sketch-4-0-8ad98783e9ba