Kactus

Design version control without changing your tools

2 followers

Design version control without changing your tools

2 followers

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Interface design tools

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Kactus is an app to unlock true version control for your design without changing your existing tools. It takes advantage of the new sketch file format and transforms them into a format that git can understand. By doing so, we can close the gap between designers and developers by using a common platform: Github.

Launch tags:Design Tools•Developer Tools•Sketch

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Im hugely interested in version control for product design. I've been using Abstract for months now with my small team, but this looks very interesting for teams who want to the design process to be inside Github. Question: does Kactus manage conflicts at an artboard level yet the way abstract does?

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9yr ago

Raycast

Hunter

@shawnroos great question — this seems like a super early version of the app, but might be a lighter approach than Abstract, and, as you mentioned, is focused on GitHub. @mathieudutour should be able to tell you more.

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9yr ago

Raycast

Maker

@shawnroos yes, compared to Abstract, Kactus gives you access to the repo so you can collocate the code and the design (fun fact, the repo for kactus is actually a kactus repo) and put it on GitHub, bridging the gap between developers and designers. Kactus leverages the new format of the sketch files (https://medium.com/sketch-app-so...) and "deconstructs" them. I have a medium post coming where I'll explain all of this.

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9yr ago

Exciting! This is a massive advancement in the field for sure. I can't wait to get my hands on it, I just need BitBucket support. I know a lot of very large companies who use only that. Is it in the roadmap to support it or something that one could do a PR for?

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9yr ago

Raycast

Maker

@northmccormick Thanks! I'm not planning to add bitbucket support in the short term, I don't have enough bandwidth to disperse myself ;) But I'd be more than happy to accept a PR for it!

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9yr ago

@mathieudutour I appreciate the transparency! I'll definitely be checking out the source later for that. Happy Monday

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9yr ago

Raycast

Maker

Thanks for the hunt @chrismessina. I'm thrilled to be on ProductHunt today. Kactus is an app to unlock true version control for your design without changing your existing tools. It takes advantage of the new sketch file format and transforms them into a format that git can understand. By doing so, we can close the gap between designers and developers by using a common platform: Github. I just published a longer post on Medium (https://medium.com/kactus-io/unl...) if you’re interested in finding out more about why I'm building Kactus. I'd love to hear your guys' feedback!

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9yr ago

Pager

Hey @mathieudutour - I'm going to carry over the comment I made on DesignerNews, I didn't realize you weren't the submitter over there until afterwards. So, I'm a bit concerned about this. This appears to be heavily built on the GitHub Desktop Client (https://desktop.github.com/), which in and of itself isn't a problem, but I wonder if releasing the software in a commercial environment would be. Also, less of an issue, is that the landing page appears to be largely copied from that same GitHub Desktop Client, even the icons. Which again, isn't earth shattering, it just feels very disingenuous when viewed all together. This of course isn't to say that real work didn't go into this project - I'd love to be able to bring proper version control into my sketch files without the addition of yet another tool.

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9yr ago

Raycast

Maker

@heyjoshturner you are right, Kactus is a fork of GitHub Desktop. Its license is MIT so it’s perfectly fine to create a commercial project out of it. Kactus is also release under the MIT license

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9yr ago

Pager

@mathieudutour Ah, I was looking at their EULA on their site (https://desktop.github.com/eula/), not the repo. The "Restrictions" block there definitely doesn't follow MIT, but I'd be willing to bet the license in the repo would supersede.

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9yr ago

Quick general question: I don't have a huge file right now to experiment, but does the new Sketch file format play nicely with Github? I've run into the file size limitation of 100 MB with Github in the past. https://help.github.com/articles...

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9yr ago

Raycast

Maker

@spjpgrd The goal is not to track the sketch files themselves but the "deconstructed" version that Kactus produces. Your sketch file will be split into a lot of smaller files (1 for each layer) so there are no issues tracking them with git and GitHub!

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9yr ago

@mathieudutour 🙌 🙏 👏 Best news I've heard all day 👏 🙏 🙌

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9yr ago

Rocketgraph

I am glad that design tools are getting version control logic - Bravo to Sketch for creating a file format that allows something like this (cough Adobe). Although been using Figma which basically has workflow logic baked in.

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9yr ago

Raycast

Maker

@dnoparavandis Figma is great for sure! But I prefer Sketch to focus on one thing and to it well while allowing other people to focus on other things and do it well :)

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9yr ago

Infinity

"Without changing your design tools" macOS / Sketch only. As a Windows / Figma / Adobe user, I would need to change *all* of my design tools - so the tagline felt rather misleading.

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9yr ago

Great work Mathieu! I've been using this for a week and my team and I are planning to use this for a serious workflow that involves designer and developer collaboration. Looking forward to it.

I'm pretty sure the conflict issue will be addressed in the upcoming updates.

Also if you can please try to add a visual representation of the git branches, (like source tree) it would also help us users understand visually how the branches merge, where the active branch is etc.

Pros:

Very good file comparison and conflict resolution and commit mechanism

Cons:

Conflict resolution when the layer/artboard names are same are a nightmare. Wish there was a one off payment method, instead of a sbscrptn

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8yr ago

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