I use Sparkle for a week now and I am very pleased!
But the two things I really, really miss are:
More devices and preferable a way to create a device myself. The sizes that I really need for mobile development (and to cover the majority of the mobile devices) are a screen width of 360, 375 and 410. The 410 is suitable for the latest iphones (414) and the samsung ones (411, 412).
When making multiple layouts (for each device) it would be very handy to click an element (text box, image, etc) and to have a button ‘Adjust to screen width’. Before clicking such a button you can set a margin for how many pixels it should keep distance from the sides. This would substantially speed up the design proces!
EDIT: For reference (screen width of almost all mobile devices). Scroll to the bottom. https://www.mydevice.io/
Adobe Muse went through the same issues… firstly it was fixed width responsive and then it went responsive width which introduced a number of “hard” issues to resolve. I know what you are saying about introducing more breakpoints but in the end, for fixed width responsive, how far do you go?
I’m wondering if a better solution would be anything under 480px introduces responsive elements adjusting for the many mobile screen sizes down to 320px? The big players nowadays are using both but trending back to adaptive design (fixed width responsive) because they have total control over how they serve their mobile sites up to their ideal client!
Another way could be instead of the % shrinkage when selecting a smaller device, that all the elements remain the same size, and we manually move them within the canvas device width plus adjust/shrink them. It is easier to manually shrink an element than enlarge it when we work form the desktop down to mobile. It would be great when shrinking a text element that the text reduces in size as well! Anyway just a few thoughts!
Thanks for the feedback. We do have plans, which are not to do what you ask, but solve the issue in a different way. It is a very complex issue to solve well, we’ll get there eventually.
Also, let me add that it’s always extra work to make page layout and typographic adjustments to each and every page in a site for two or more device widths. There has to be reasonable strategy for limiting all of the redundant work implied by multiplying the number of device widths to target.
