We are Avishay, Michal and Or, founders of Anima App (https://www.animaapp.com). We let designers create UIs in Sketch and then export HTML and CSS.
One the biggest pain points that we’ve experienced working in the software development industry, like so many before us, is the process of taking design to production. Designers today use tools like Sketch to design websites, web apps, or mobile apps, but these tools are limited and static. After experiencing the pain first-hand for over a decade, we resigned ourselves to try to make any kind of improvement we could.
We started by building our own fully-featured design studio software that allowed users to design iOS apps and export Swift code. But we quickly learned that although people were excited about it and tried it out, after about a week they went back to using Sketch. We realized that while writing algorithms for a layout engine is hard, getting adoption for your new product is harder!
Luckily one of our users pointed us in the right direction when they said that out of everything we’ve built, they were only really excited about our Auto-Layout engine. And so we decided to yank out our Auto-Layout solution and release it as a Sketch plugin. That was the turning point for us. Auto-Layout became very popular (100k users) and to this day is a main engine of growth for us.
In the past year and a half we shipped three products:
• Auto-Layout - Responsive Design for Sketch[1]
• Launchpad - Export Sketch to HTML[2]
• Timeline - Interaction Design for Sketch[3]
Of course we are dogfooding our products and have built our websites using our own tools.
We’re sure that Hacker News readers will have a ton of experience in this space, and would love to hear about your experiences and ideas!
[1] https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/introducing-auto-layou...