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

Typography. Swift. React. Devices. It has it all.

Before we dive into the details of today’s update, we want to give a huge shoutout to the entire designer and developer community for your unending support, because..

Supernova has now been used by more than 5,000 people in 2 months 💖

Wow. We never expected this kind of support and interest in our wildest dreams. And it only pushes us to release more interesting features faster. V3 is now available and brings hundreds of fixes, quality-of-life improvements and a several major features that will make development even faster. What’s new?

New Text Engine — Inline editing of texts, support for attributed strings
Swift 3 & 4 — Change Swift versions for iOS exports
Non-Expo React Projects — Select between different bases for React Native projects — either Expo or non-Expo
Reengineered iOS and Android Simulators — Now 200% more awesome
Target Configuration — Supernova now supports both tablets and mobile devices. Users can select which devices run the application

New Text Engine

Having text to appear in your mobile app exactly as it was designed is really complicated. In fact, it is so complicated that most of the developers usually tweak labels by hand instead of taking precise measurements. Why?

Making the texts appear like they are meant to be can be excruciating

The differences within the rendering engines on each platform is quite huge. For example, OS X provides text rendering engine that Sketch internally uses but interprets it in a very different way which results in differences in positioning, spacing and more. As to be expected, neither OS X or Sketch is compatible with mobile rendering engines for iOS or Android which makes it even more difficult.

We’ve painstakingly created an engine that can both accept data from Sketch and convert them to the data required by mobile rendering engines, assuring the texts are pixel perfect — even though their bounding frames are not. The following image shows just how precise it is:

Text rendered in Sketch on the left, text rendered in Supernova on the right. Or is it the opposite?

In V3, the imperfect conversion of texts is gone forever. Supernova is also able to export attributed strings to all 3 platforms, so you can have texts with multiple styles or different spacing/heights.

Swift 3 & Swift 4

One of the most requested features is finally here as well — export to Swift 3 and Swift 4, based on the project you are working on.

The configuration can be changed at any point, so if you ever decide to go to update your project to a newer version, you can simply change it in Supernova as well and the entire conversion is done for you.

iOS Code generated by Supernova using new Swift 4 optioniOS Code generated by Supernova using the Swift 3.2 option — things are different

We have made the exporters extensible so once Swift 5 is scheduled for release, we plan for near-immediate support for those who like to adventure into the wilderness. 😃

Pure React and Expo Projects

The first release of the React Native exporter depended heavily on the Expo platform — it is great because out of the box, it solves several pain points which otherwise need to be solved by hand.

That being said, dependency on 3rd party platforms isn’t always desired, especially if the projects require a lot of flexibility. For this reason, we are happy to announce, you are able to switch from Expo to pure React Native projects.

To Expo or Not to Expo? That is up to you now, no more binding to a specific platform

We’ve solved all major problems which usually follow that kind of the project — dependencies, font and navigation management, configuration of icons, launch images, etc.

We believe this will allow our users to use Supernova to much greater extent than before — React Native is used quite a lot among our user base and we cannot wait to share more improvements soon.

iOS and Android Simulators

To have a real app experience, we’ve shipped with the actual iOS and Android integration — but that was very rudimentary implementation and we knew it wasn’t up to par with what people expected.

For the V3, we’ve prepared a new interface with a completely rewritten system of how the simulators are done to be faster and more reliable.

You can now select specific iOS or Android simulator directly from the Supernova interface

Additionally, the simulator now allows you to pick the devices installed on your system and informs you when something went wrong.

Target Devices and Orientations

Last but not least, Supernova is now fully compatible with tablets and creates apps in both landscape and portrait resolutions. Now, you can target specific group of devices when exporting (iOS only) to better cater to the needs of your specific app.

Devices and orientations can now be changed on fly before you export

Trials…Trials Everywhere

As with the previous update, we have extended the trial of all the users by 14 days! 😮 You can now enjoy the new Supernova text system and all the improvements without limits, starting today. We are looking forward to your feedback!

If you want to check the full scope of the changes, head over to our website and dive into the details or test them for yourself right away.

By the way! We are listening to your feedback (and we have a new dedicated page to give us your feedback!). We are working on something truly amazing for V4. We might take a little more time than usual to have it right but we believe it will be well worth it and we cannot wait to share it with you.

Hope you like what you see and happy coding!

With ❤️ from your friends at Supernova

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

Supernova Studio V3 just landed 🚀 was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Supernova Studio V3 just landed

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles