Principle for Mac was developed by the previous Apple engineer ‘Daniel Hooper’. And I think that he made such a remarkable application which easily animates your Sketch design.
We already know that there are various prototyping animation tools. Framers, Flinto, UXPin, Invisionapp and so on… But, I think that Principle for Mac has a potentional to be populated among designers.
3 reasons that I recommend Principle for you
First, Principle makes a great quality animation based on your design. You might think Framer as one of the best UI animation tool in this area. I agree with it. By the way Principle seems that it doesn’t fall behind Framer in the race. Look at the animation that I created with Principle below.
Second, Principle is really easy to learn and use. I think that the weakness of Framer is not to easy. You have to learn Javascript or Coffeescript to create an animation. If you already have an experience to code, it could be no problem. But, I guess that mostly designers wouldn’t be good at coding. Designers are normally reactive to visible things or objects. Photoshop, illustrators and Sketch, those tools which desingers use everyday follows that notion.
Therefore Principle for Mac tries a different approach from Framer. Principle for Mac has almost same interface like Sketch which UI designers mostly use in these days. So you don’t need to learn the interface of Principle.
Also, Principle’s way to animate between artboards is like using Magic Move on Keynote. Let me say that it just works!
Third, Principle has various options to share your animation. Principle can export an animation work to an independent Mac app. So even though an user doesn’t have Principle for Mac, he or she can open and run it on his/her Mac. And it can also export animations to video or animated GIF file. I love this feature. I can share animations from Principle through all kind of channels, Facebook, Messanger, Twitter, Dribble, etc.
I think Principle team strategically put this into Principle for marketing.
Some ideas for Principle for Mac
Principle recently released version 1.2. And I think that they are rapidly updating Principle in the near future.
Through my experience I come up with several ideas for Principle.
- More options to control audio and video layers’ properties.
- Easily add a typing animation
- Share the animation through web
- AppleScript support