Today I finally got a chance to try out Subform, it’s different but in a good way.
I believe that I’ve seen an image dataset in Subform’s Kickstarter video, how do I do that? The case is that I’ve “component-ized” the tab bar but now the icon is propagated to all of its instances.
Here’s the source file.
Subform and the Subform logo is trademarks of General Reactives, 
@artblanc would you mind sharing your experience in building this document? Specifically:
To clarify, I'm asking out of genuine interest and to compare notes with my experience using Subform albeit so far only in short doses this past week.
I also am wondering the same as @artblanc.
As I am having the same problem, as my list items are the same component so I cannot change individual image files for each component.
- What do you think makes Subform different, and in comparison to what other tool, specifically?
The fact that it behaves like box-model/auto-layout is the key difference. Every object aware of its surrounding, and every text is actually a box. I wish that Sketch has a “button” tool that behave like this —in Keynote every text object is a box— so the box and text object is not a separate entity.
- What elements within Subform made your workflow easier than using X (X being the tool you normally use to build a screen like this)?
It forces me to think of how things laid out in a structure, whereas with a layer model the object size and position, are irrelevant.
- What elements within Subform made your workflow more difficult than using X?
Lack of drawing tool, oval, polygon, line, etc. But I get that they want to build something simple first and then expand from there.
- Did anything in particular take you out of 'the zone', assuming you got in one at some point?
Whenever I change child layout axis things breaks, and kinda freaks me out a bit. Also the default background-position should be centered at 50% 50% and no-repeat.
- What are your thoughts regarding either the layout engine and/or components as two potentially key capabilities that make Subform a superior design tool?
Component with multiple data set and overwrite-able datum is a killer feature for me, but the GUI need more polish. Subform’s layout engine is easy enough for me to wrapped my head around, but I don’t know how others with no front-end dev experience feel about it.
Hi @artblanc The photo variant stuff was a bit rough, so we took that out of Subform before our first release to ya'll.
We're focused on a better layout engine story right now, but likely sometime in early 2017 we'll circle back to the problem of image variants.
I think for now you could simulate this functionality by making the image's box a component and creating different states for it that contain different images.
