Some of us here thought this day would never come, but the long wait is finally over. We’re incredibly proud to tell you that Sketch 2.3 now available for all.

So what’s so great about this release? Glad you asked. I suppose you could say that 2.3 is our ‘Snow Leopard’ release. We’ve spent a great deal making everything just better, faster and more reliable. To start with, we’ve done amazing work on general responsiveness and performance. For example, panning and zooming is now fluent and instant. Basically everything is faster, and if you previously had a document that Sketch was choking on, chances are it’ll zip right through them now.

Document saving and loading has improved spectacularly as well by the way, in some cases up to 10x.

PDF and EPS

Secondly, we’re adding PDF and EPS import to Sketch. Vectors and text in these files now get converted to native Sketch layers where you can work with them to your heart’s content. Naturally we’ve also improved our existing SVG import and export. With all of this it’s now much easier to get content in and out of Sketch.

Boolean Operations

Our next major focus was on improving our Boolean operations; union, subtract, etc. They work really well overall, but had a nasty habit of failing for very small sizes. Our new engine does much better there and if you ever ran into the limitations of the old way, we’re sure you’ll appreciate the changes.

Background Blur

A nice little other feature is our brand new iOS-7 style Background Blur. We’re sure this will come in handy when designing for iOS 7. As the name implies, Background blur blurs the background behind a shape and not itself nor anything around it. You asked for this en masse, so enjoy it. :-)

Sketch Mirror

Another big feature is our new companion app to Sketch; Sketch Mirror. For all of you who want to view the designs you make on your Mac on one of your iOS devices; this app is for you.

Sketch Mirror is that it’s integrated directly into Sketch 2.3. There’s no setup, and no ugly hacks; Sketch sends the data directly to one or more iOS devices and is smart about which areas of the canvas have updated, so it transfers the minimum amount of data, making Sketch Mirror very fast, even when sending Retina assets over the network.

Sketch will also automatically scale your artboards up or down depending on the device’s resolution. For example, if you design an iPad app at 1x resolution, Sketch will automatically send the @2x version to your iPad, or vice versa if you want to test your designs on both an iPad Mini and a Retina iPad.

Sketch Mirror is now available in the iOS app store for only $4.99.

Other Stuff

What’s left is a ton of smaller improvements to the app. For example, Pages now have live previews and you can add/remove/duplicate pages without having to go elsewhere. Another small but much-requested feature is that we now support blending modes on shadows and inner shadows too.

And of course, Sketch 2.3 will be a free upate for existing users, so if you haven’t tried Sketch yet, get your copy now at …

Our new Website

Besides the launch of Sketch 2.3, we’ve also unveiled our new website - with some amazing new artwork done 100% in Sketch. Please give it a look.