It took a full year working odd hours here and there. The reality of side projects, you do what you can with the time you get/have. Easier when you are two people working together like Fredrik and me.
Actually you can accomplish wonders when the motivation is right and the feeling is great. When you get so much great support from you guys, this amazing community of designers and developers world wide. Gives us energy to sit down, no matter what, and work with this when our families has gone to bed and where hammering away on our laptops doing this and that. Waking up very tired better-half’s because forgetting not to sit right outside the bedroom snoring (me because of a cold) and tapping tapping (writing this very story). Payed a price. Worth it? Time will tell. ?
When it happened
Our main goal was always reaching this milestone and we finally did it, even before 2018 turning into 2019. It was December 30th. I was with my family at our cottage in Dalarna for some well needed rest and vacation. Got a private Slack mess from Fredrik saying:
Fixat innan 2019 means Fixed it before 2019!
Looked at the video he had recorded and smiled ? I knew we would reach this before 2019 but we don’t pressure each other with hard deadlines. It gets done when it gets done. Important thing is to always move forward to some kind of goal. We always make sure to respect our own lives with all the responsibilities it comes with. This is still a side project that we do on un-paid extra time.
What happens now?
We’re going to conduct a very private pilot where we are going to invite a selected few out there that in one way or another has been very supportive/positive to us, just all around great people. For a full month they will get access to our much sought after React export feature.
After that?
After a full month of testing we will gather all the feedback we get and make it even better. We’re ironing out details on how to make this project sustainable, even profitable, so some kind of paid license will be needed to access React export. Our framework, plugin, code app and HTML export in its current iteration will always be available for free as long as we can support it. By supporting it means that it doesn’t require us to spend countless of hours on support or other very time consuming activities.
Thoughts about the future of Sketch2React
We are toying with all kinds of cool ideas. Maybe we release some kind of developer license that will give you access to some of the magic that converts native Sketch tools to code? Payed on-demand code component building with exclusive or non-exclusive rights? If there is a need we’ll make sure to make room for it. Why? Because it’s the most exciting thing we have ever created and been involved in. ?
We also dream about converting our render engine to some kind of Unity-for-designer-tools. All of these are just thoughts, visions, dreams and they will of course not be true without monetary support of some kind. But reach for the moon and you will come half-way? Or crash ? ?
Anyway! These are exciting times to be alive, stay tuned!