Big Little Updates: Faster Collection creation, quick Commits, and more

We’re always working to improve Abstract for you. And we know that “smaller” feature enhancements can make a big impact on your workflow. That’s why we wanted to highlight several updates that will help you work faster and more seamlessly, and give you more control over what you see on your screen. Take a look and let us know what you think.

Create Collections faster with multi-select

Collaboration and presentation is integral to design. Collections allow you to share work with your teammates and stakeholders for feedback and approval. If you’re sharing a flow or options for designs, you should always create a Collection.

Before this release, you'd need to create and name a Collection prior to adding artboards to it. Now, you can select all the artboards you want to show and then create the Collection in a single "Create & Add" step. This new flow eliminates any friction from the process of creating a new Collection and helps you see and organize all your files before naming the Collection.

We also added a button that lets you jump from Collections directly into Inspect, making engineers' lives easier, too 😉

Commit changes without leaving Sketch

Communicating changes is an important part of collaboration. A Commit is like a super save -- with a short description. It’s how you document and share your save history and keep track of what changes were made, when, and why.

Remember when you had to bounce back into Abstract to commit your changes? Now, you can better maintain your creative flow by committing your work inside of Sketch.

Our new quick Commit window summarizes your changes and lets you interact with your entire Sketch file, so you can reference your work as you are committing. After you commit, you can pick up right where you left off within Sketch.

Resize comment and Commit history panels

If you’ve ever tried to read a long, thoughtful comment in a narrow column, you won’t need to squint anymore. You can now resize the left and right panels to make space for history or comments when previewing work. Our goal with this update was to meet you in your current work mode -- whether it’s thinking through feedback, reviewing work history, or seeing what’s changed over a period of time.

This small but mighty update means you have more granular control to set the ideal size for each of the panels, so you can decide to focus on design, comments, or reviewing the history of changes.

Update Library references in files with Manage Libraries

Any time you can use one tool instead of two is a win. With this update, you can fix broken Library Symbol references without using a Sketch plugin. From the Files tab, right click any Sketch file and select “Manage Libraries…” to restore references to any Libraries within the Abstract Project.

Check out the release notes for all the details.

Updates like these often come directly from users like you. Share your suggestions by dropping us a note or tweeting @goabstract.