Sketch vs Jitter
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Sketch ships its Dublin release on Mac and quietly stakes a claim in design-for-AI-agents.
Sketch's recent run mixes long-requested Mac feature work (Dublin release: selection colors, independent borders, corner smoothing, color-variable eyedropper) with a clear bet on AI-driven design workflows (the Implement Design Skill for AI Agents, sharing reusable workflows from a public skills repo). Web work is concentrated on developer handoff. Document-sharing got a real upgrade with selective Previews and a first-party Slack integration. Several entries appear duplicated upstream.
Two trajectories run in parallel. The Mac app stays opinionated and feature-deep — Dublin is a long-feature-requests release rather than a redesign — while the web app focuses on the collaboration and handoff loop where Figma is strongest. The Skills for AI Agents move is the most interesting because it positions Sketch as a target for agentic AI tools rather than a tool that uses AI internally.
Expect another major Mac release later this year that builds on Dublin's design primitives, plus more AI-agent skill primitives so that tools like Cursor or Claude can manipulate Sketch documents through structured workflows. The web app will likely keep tightening developer handoff to compete on the Figma-vs-Sketch axis.
Jitter AI lets users describe the creative tool they want — and Jitter builds it inside the editor.
Jitter is in an aggressive shipping cadence focused on what's possible on the canvas itself. May brought two flagship additions: a fully animatable Glass effect with refraction, depth, dispersion, and frost, and Jitter AI — a system where users describe the effect they want and Jitter generates a reusable custom tool right inside the Animate tab. Underneath, the editor is being hardened with batch export, an upgraded pen tool for compound paths, displacement shaders, and corner-radius granularity.
Jitter is moving from 'better motion design tool' to 'AI-extensible motion platform.' The Jitter AI release is the clearest signal of intent — instead of competing on how many built-in effects ship, Jitter is letting users (and teams) generate, refine, and share their own tools by prompt. The rest of the recent work fills in the underlying primitives (shaders, compound paths, granular shape controls) that AI-generated tools need to build on. The product is positioning itself between Figma-style design fidelity and After Effects-style motion fidelity, with AI as the wedge.
Expect Jitter AI to evolve into a marketplace or team library where prompt-generated tools are versioned and shared, plus deeper Figma-import fidelity (the Figma-import polish suggests Jitter sees Figma as the upstream source rather than a competitor). A web-export pipeline for AI-generated effects to ship as Lottie or WebGL components is the obvious next step.
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