Introducing all new Supernova! Also, YCombinator!
We start each year with a promise to ourselves. The last year was all about launching a solid and robust product — making sure our early adopters were happy and more productive — and we nailed this goal.
This year though will be about ramping up and building a product unlike any other, with a clear goal to completely automate design handoff.
But before we dive into what we’ve been working on for the last 4 months, let me give you a bit of awesome news — Supernova is now part of YCombinator 🚀, currently running as part of batch W19! *crowd cheering*
Because being in YC is an experience like no other, we will be dedicating an entire series to it over the next few weeks. Today, let’s focus on what is much more important — the new Supernova update, V6.
Since the beginning of Supernova, we strove to have the most precise conversion possible but always fell short. This was mainly because we were restricted by the limitations of the technologies we were using. The technology good enough for the purpose of what we were building just wasn’t invented yet. Until now.
We’ve already used Sketch for a lot of things it wasn’t meant to do and further tinkering didn’t produce the desired effect. So we’ve decided to build the rest of the missing technologies ourselves. Today, we are releasing the new Supernova, completely powered by our own, brand new import, export, and rendering engine. And it now supports a new export platform — Flutter!
Meet Archon — the most powerful design-to-code engine ever built. This time, without compromises.
The worst thing about releasing any new feature is to name it. Who would have guessed? And yet, the name Archon absolutely fits our criteria. It is easy enough to remember, means “be the first” or “commander” in old greek, and, in general, sounds pretty epic ⭐
Archon is the future of Supernova and a culmination of almost 4 years of development. It is a high-performance analytics engine used to import, parse, optimize and structure designs from any external source and prepare it to a data format that can further be used for any purpose — be it a generation of production code or something else entirely.
With Archon in place, we were able to get rid of all remnants of hacks we did to Sketch to make Supernova work, making Supernova vastly faster and unlocking the potential to do things that no one else can do. The use of Archon as the core technology of Supernova has both short-term and long-term impacts that will be obvious from the second you open Supernova V6.
Import like a boss ✋ 🎤
Since we have complete control over the entire process now, we fixed most of the import issues from Sketch. Now, things like (nested) symbols, (nested) overrides, text styles and colors are all supported. All things vector-related are supported. All types of fills, gradients, borders, and shadows are supported as well. And best of all — the new importer is orders of magnitude faster than the previous one.
But Supernova is not just about importing. While all other tools import layers 1:1, Supernova doesn’t preserve that information. Instead, it intelligently optimizes the layer structure to better represent the actual mobile application. The new optimization module is much smarter and produces a very precise representation even when the design is badly-structured.
Render faster. Much, much faster ⚡
The second big thing is that Archon directly binds to our new rendering engine. We’ve used third-party implementations of rendering engines, but it didn’t work well for us and didn’t allow for much customization — so we wrote one ourselves. You’ll see it being used everywhere — from the export of the assets, to preview, to a navigation map.
And it is fast, really fast. When compared to exporting assets using the Sketch export library, it is on average 50 times faster. This means that your assets are ready nearly immediately, and Studio is much more responsive. But it also means that it would be possible to.. ah you know, we’ll keep this as a surprise for a bit more ^^ Stay tuned!
We’ve also added a way how to make screen preview images to change in real-time as you are making modifications, so it always represents your design. And so much more.
Merge your design changes 🤯
Supernova always allowed the re-import of screens when changes were made in the source Sketch file. That being said, re-import was really a “replace,” so whatever work you did previously got lost when the specific screen was re-imported. But that is no longer the case.
Archon is built in such a way that it can recognize the changes to the Sketch file, recognize the changes done to the Supernova file, and merge them both — preserving design information from the source and work information (such as animations, navigation, etc.) from Supernova.
Improvements, improvements everywhere
Supernova V6 contains a ton of small improvements: a new Obsidian color scheme that’s very crisp and looks gorgeous on both small and large displays and a lot of quality-of-life improvements so you can work faster than ever before.
We can’t wait to see what you build with it. Stay tuned for more articles coming out this week where we dive deeper into each feature and explore it properly.
Until next time,
Team Supernova ❤️
- Get a copy of Supernova Studio now at https://supernova.io/download
- Start with our amazing tutorial series — Creation of “Spacebook”
- Join our community Slack to discuss all you wish to know about Supernova and its upcoming features, like websites, model and network creation, plugins and more! Our community is what we are the proudest of. It is lively and everyone there is amazing. Come join us.
- Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest and greatest updates not only about Supernova but about design in general as well.
