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Picnic

Archived Check it out 

A simple observation, a little UI hackery, and some basic file syncronization: all you need to bring real-time collaboration into Sketch, or potentially any other traditionally solo-user applicaton.

I have been major proponent of collaborative tools. So when Figma had yet to improve their core platform (they’ve fixed it), and our office was migrating to sketch, I took a look at the way their files were structured. Turns out, a little easily accessible JSON makes entire projects available to be managed programmatically.

Who wants to work alone anymore

From previous experience working on real-time collaboration tools, I recognized an opportunity to bring basic file syncronization (literally via the Dropbox API) and a small plugin to diff and resolve changes, we could bring multiple users into the same Sketch project.

Better results over rsync

We built a small Electron app to manage shared projects, a UI plugin to replace the default page manager with our super-powered collaborative version, and a web service to speedily sync projects via bittorrent.

A variety of unrelated factors ultimately prevented us from launching and now Figma is the future. But that’s a story for another time.