An update on the future of Paddy! 😱

[DWilliames]

An update on Paddy…

Firstly thank you so much to everyone for the love and support of Paddy since I launched version 1 back in February ❤️, and I’m sorry for the lack of communication and updates recently.

I wanted to clear the air — so bear with me for the long update.

Why no updates for the last couple of months?

Great question. I went on a holiday during August/September and didn’t take my laptop with me — which was great! To be completely honest, I was a little burnt out and needed a break. When I got back; I came across a beta version of Sketch 52, an amazing update, and incredible work from the Sketch team. However, unfortunately it broke a lot in Paddy 2. Not just a little, but a lot. This was a bit disheartening; and I lost a lot of motivation.
I’ve really dropped the ball in replying to all the emails / bug reports in the last couple of weeks and I deeply apologise for that. 😓 I really appreciate all the time taken by others to submit these, and I feel really bad for my lack of response.

So what happens now?

After spending numerous hours over the last couple of days trying to fix Paddy 2 for Sketch 52 — I’ve come to the conclusion that it probably isn’t maintainable going forward. This is extremely unfortunate, because I had just started to make some real progress in ‘nested symbol’ support.

I have just released a final Paddy 2 update (v0.7) that will only work on versions earlier than Sketch 52 with the experimental ‘nested symbol’ support that I’m sure a lot of people have been wanting — however, I don’t plan on fixing it for Sketch 52+ going forward. It’s a cool proof of concept, and hopefully can provide some inspiration for the Sketch team 😉

Wrapping up work on Paddy…

After hundreds of hours of working on Paddy… I have come to the hard decision to stop working on it going forward for a couple of reasons;

1. Time consuming — I currently have a full-time job as a Product designer and also a 3 hour commute to work each day, and I have a loving wife that needs my attention at home. To be frank, the amount of time that supporting Paddy was taking up was unsustainable; and began to really limit me working on anything else
2. Personal usage — I original built Paddy because it was something I really needed, and couldn’t believe it didn’t already exist. I built out features because I personally found them valuable in my every day job, and it was a bonus that it was helpful for others. In my work life however, I have transitioned to using Figma as my day-to-day tool over the last couple of months, which makes it hard to support and update software that I don’t use anymore.
3. Maintainability — I knew that Paddy 2 would be ambitious, but I think I bit off more than I could chew. Unfortunately, for big updates such as Sketch 52, it introduces some discrepancies to previous versions that need to be worked around. This involves duplicating code to support each version in it’s own unique way, which is extremely time consuming, and tough to test.
4. Complexity — a plugin like Paddy 2 is deeply integrated in the layout lifecycles of Sketch; and is hooked into a range of fine-tuned actions. For something like this to continue functioning properly, these features really need to built and supported directly by the Sketch team.

My goal of Paddy all along was to fill a gap in the design workflow — I treated it as a Proof of Concept, and the adoption was truly surprising. Going forward I hope that the success and adoption of Paddy can be a testament of the need for something like this, and is enough ammunition to get the Sketch team to look into building similar functionality directly into Sketch. 🙌

Paddy 2 should at least continue to work in versions before Sketch 42.

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Possible questions

Let me try and answer a few possible questions that might come off the back of this...

“Will financial support help?”
I really appreciate the generosity of the design community who has responded by asking this, it really means a lot! ❤️ A few people have already donated some money via PayPal, and that really did help me keep pursuing up to this point — it was definitely not received in vein. But unfortunately, I don’t think I can commit the time it will require to support ongoing even with the support of some money.

“I’ve already built my Design System on top of Paddy, what now?”
That’s really cool to hear – and that was one of the reasons I loved building and using Paddy. The way I see it, Paddy was always an extension to Sketch’s functionality; therefore, the lack of Paddy shouldn’t break anything, you just won’t get auto-resizing anymore… which I understand is a big bummer.

“Can I contribute to the code to help fix it?”
If you’d be willing too, that would be amazing. Unfortunately, it’s all built within a Cocoa Framework in Objective C, so it might be a bit tough. Also my code is terribly written and undocumented, so you may struggle. However, if you do want to look at the code for inspiration I will be open sourcing it in the coming days.
Paddy 1 however is already open-sourced, and the code is probably a bit easier to understand. So please feel free to make some pull-requests there!

“Can you get Sketch to build this natively?”
I would love Sketch to work on ‘Stacks’ and ‘Padding’ — and i will do anything/everything I can to help them in anyway to try and get this to happen. Let’s continue to keep requesting these features until they build it :P

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Thank-you 🙏

While it’s extremely sad to cut ties with Paddy, it’s also a bit of a relief to come to this decision.
The support all along has been incredible, and I'm really sorry to let everyone down in this way.

Let's try and get Sketch to create this functionality natively. 😜

Off the back of Paddy, If you want to support me in an easy way to see what else I build in the future, please follow me on Twitter, I’d really appreciate it :) https://twitter.com/DavidWilliames

If you have any more questions, please ask here and I will try and reply promptly.

[RyanRoberts]

Oh well, unfortunate but understandable. The Sketch team would be making such a big mistake if they never implemented (at least something like) stacks and padding into the app itself, so let's hope that does happen.

[dlewand691]

Thanks for the update, Dave. Really appreciate all your hard work on Paddy and wish you the best. I know first-hand how hard it is to juggle work, family and outside projects.

Everyone else, we should push Bohemian Coding to integrate these features into Sketch natively! They make so much sense and everything much more efficient.

[highvoltaged]

I think what we could do is to put some pressure on the Sketch team by emailnig them as a feature request. Even Framer has this built in (quite great actually), and they are a direct competitor.

I'm sad this project is discontinued, i will stick to pre 52, cause i can't really work without it.

[Yaroslavoff]

I’ve already built my Design System on top of Paddy, what now?

Terrible that it's true 😨
Sad to hear. Just one hope for nested support.

[tankxu]

Thanks for your hard work. Paddy helps me save much time in the past days. I turned back to use Sketch from Figma when i found paddy, it's so great and Figma can't achieve this function. Paddy leaves me too fast.

Looking forward to your new work.

[AliceCasari]

This is a big problem!! 😨

[bomberstudios]

Hey David!

Today is indeed a sad day.

The whole team at Sketch wants to thank you for all your hard work with Paddy. It's always inspiring when people redefine what’s possible with a plugin, and you’ve made a lot of people happy by solving a (very painful) problem for them.

We love when people put their code where their mouth is and actually build the thing they say they want, and the work you’ve done has definitely inspired us to explore some ideas around that area. We only hope we can do a good enough job following in your footsteps, and look forward to shipping a native solution for the same problem in the near future.

Keep being awesome ❤️

[highvoltaged]

Now that was unexpected :D :D

[aparajita]

@bomberstudios Now that Framer X has stacks (and did it right), it's definitely time for Sketch to step up and provide them natively.

[amaxbox]

Here is the way to make it works with wrapping background:

[tschmeisser]

@DWilliames What a bummer, but I know this was quite a beast for you to build Thank you for all your hard work, it can be tough developing/supporting/dealing with opinions. Great idea, great implementation.

@bomberstudios I really hope that is true! This padding and stacking functionality is what I've been waiting for in a UI tool forever and I find it interesting that Framer shipped it before any other design tool. It definitely feels like a native-need for what we all do day-to-day alongside constraints. Excited to hear more.