Group sizing bug in Sketch app on macOS

Update: I submitted this to the Sketch team as a bug report. They’ve responded that it should be fixed in the next version and is already fixed in the current Beta.

Update (May 31, 2019): This issue is now fixed in Sketch (v55.1). Thanks!

I’ve noticed a bug in Sketch and I’ve documented it here in a quick screen-cast in hopes that it will get fixed and that others can understand and work around it.

To trigger the bug:

  1. Create two objects in a Sketch document
  2. Group those two objects
  3. Select one of those objects and move it with the keyboard in such a way that the group is now larger (for example, move the rightmost object further to the right)
  4. Click anywhere on the canvas to clear the selection and apply the keyboard move
  5. Select the group and notice that the width of the group is that from before the move – double-clicking on the portion of the moved object that is outside of the group has no effect

Now, to get Sketch to properly reflect the new larger size of the group, select one of the objects in the group and hit Escape. This seems to trigger Sketch to update the size of the group.

It sounds complicated when written out like that, but I’ve narrated a quick screen-cast to illustrate the issue:

Screen-cast of Sketch group sizing bug


 

Distance-to-poll visualization

“My friend Peter”, as I refer to him frequently in anecdotes around the house, has posted a few fascinating visualizations of how far people need to travel to vote in the upcoming Prince Edward Island provincial election.

A map showing the distance from each address on Prince Edward Island to the corresponding polling station
Visualization by Peter Rukavina from Ruk.ca

For those not following along with the democratic experiments of Canada’s smallest province, this next election is paired with a referendum on proportional representation. While it is as much advocacy as information, I found this 8-minute explanation of the Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system in question to be helpful.

 

Behind the scenes of a snarky blog post

On my lovely-but-brisk walk to work this morning, I was listening to episode 346 of the Shop Talk Show, a great podcast about front-end Web development. The smart and delightful hosts, Chris and Dave were discussion how React has become such a dominant force in Web development.

I opened up the WordPress app on my phone. Since it was cold and I had gloves on, I tried something unusual for me. I used the voice-to-text feature to speak this snarky little post into the phone and push it up to this very site. After correcting a new misheard words and capitalization, I used my cold fingers to publish this:

I took a spin in a time machine this morning. I jumped seven years into the future and what I saw was chilling.
Everywhere I looked Web developers were working diligently to remove React as dependency from their Web projects.

Feeling pretty cool about living in a future where you can spout off snarky quips and push them to the Web, I arrived at my desk to find an email from my friend Peter asking what my post was about. Peter is a fellow Web developer, but is smart enough to be immune to tech fads–unless they have to do with geolocation.

Peter’s question made it clear that my snarky quick robot-transcribed blog post was completely lacking in context for most human beings; perhaps even most humans who read this site. So, this post is to answer Peter’s question about what I was talking about.

First, React is a “Javascript library for building user interfaces” from the developers at Facebook. It’s powerful, flexible, and fast, but like any technology, it has its drawbacks and unintended side-effects. I was reminded of how technologies rise and fall in the Web development industry and how, unless they are a fundamental part of the platform, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, they are inevitably replaced by something better.

Ten years ago, JQuery was the cool kid in the world of front-end Web development. Now, projects celebrate ridding themselves of a dependency on JQuery.

It’s easy to imagine, as I did this morning, a not-too-distant future where React has fallen out of favor, but still lives embedded deep within the walls of many of our websites.

As a Twitter-lurker-but-not-poster, I imagine this is what it’s like to use Twitter every day.