Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Plant

A few days ago Plant became publicly available. At the time of launch we received a lot of positive feedback, a ton of congratulations, as well as questions on how Plant differs from what designers already have.

So how is Plant different from what is already there?

Tight integration with Sketch

Plant is more integrated into Sketch interface and designers’ workflow than other similar tools. Plant allows you to create projects, send/load latest changes, add users to the project, and restore any previous version of the file, all without leaving Sketch. Plant’s push notification system will let you know when your project has changes from other users.

Plant Panel

There is no file size limit

Plant does not have any size restrictions on file uploads, however the time for loading and sending changes may be affected.

Powerful conflict resolution system

Plant lets you resolve conflicts inside Sketch on an artboard level. When changes collide, Plant will prompt you to choose, combine or create new artboard inside Sketch.

When resolving conflicts, it builds up the conflict resolution process in the order so that conflicts of symbols are resolved first, then the artboards that contain instances of these symbols. All symbols are involved in resolving the conflicts of the artboards in which they are used, plus the newly created symbols are saved during the resolution in the document master.

Conflict Resolution

Send only selected artboards

You can send the whole file or only selected artboards that you want to share.

Protection against sending incomplete changes

Plant will warn you against the incomplete shipment of related artboards.

What does this mean?

Imagine, you create a master symbol and an artboard which contains the instance of this symbol. And the next time you send changes you forget to send the master symbol. In this case, another user on the project will receive not only an irrelevant version, but also an artboard with a broken instance of the symbol.

Plant is free from these shortcomings. It knows about all the dependencies in the artboards and will preserve the integrity of the latest changes.

Send only selected artboards with protection against sending incomplete changes

Quick access to projects or artboards on web app from Sketch

In the process of working on the design, it is often necessary to remember the process of work on the project.

To access the latest version of the Project: On Plant panel click on web app (earth icon) or use shortcut ctr+cmd+W

To access the latest version of the Artboard: Select the artboard on the canvas or in the Sketch artboard panel, then on Plant panel click on web app (earth icon) or use shortcut ctr+cmd+W

Plant will take you to the web app with latest version of the project or artboard.

Quick access to project or artboard on web app from Sketch

Sketch Libraries

Symbols from Sketch Libraries file can be shared across all your project. In case you don’t want to share your Sketch Libraries file with other contributors, but you have projects which use symbols from Sketch Libraries file, Plant is smart enough to version it and contributors won’t lose the latest version of those symbols.

Deleting local repositories

As we all know, design files can take up a lot of space and it would be pointless to store all the extra luggage of old projects on your computer.

Plant cares about the volume of local repositories on the user’s computer. If you decide to complete the project and delete the project on the server. After the deletion Plant will remove everything that’s unnecessary to the user. Don’t worry though, the file with the latest design will remain untouched.

And much more…

View detailed history of changes
Compare any two artboard versions
Annotate on artboards
Restore any version
And of course the full security of your data.

We have a lot of interesting stuff in store for our users, which are not only for designers, but also for project managers and developers.

Try it yourself, and let us know what you think about Plant.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

8 Reasons why designers use Plant for version control was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

8 Reasons why designers use Plant for version control

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