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How to use the new ProtoPie plugin for Adobe XD
ProtoPie has rebuilt the importing feature for Adobe XD. Supporting a wealth of new features that are sure to improve your XD to ProtoPie workflow.
What ProtoPie now calls the legacy importer had many shortcomings. Things like only importing graphics as PNGs and only being able to import a single artboard at a time. Thankfully those things have now been fixed with the new ProtoPie plugin for Adobe XD. This plugin drops in hot on the heels of the Figma plugin that was released a few months ago and in many respects has a similar feature set.
Of course all software has its subtle differences and idiosyncrasies and there are some things you need to know when using the XD plugin. So let’s go through what the XD plugin has to offer and what you can do with it.
The big difference from a workflow perspective is that now you export to ProtoPie rather than importing from Adobe XD. If you choose Adobe XD from the import menu inside of ProtoPie you’ll be redirected to the plugin website which will trigger the plugin page within XD. Once installed ProtoPie works like any other plugin, accessible from the plugins panel within XD’s interface.
SVG replaces PNG
In ProtoPie 5.2 and below the XD importer only supported the importing of objects as PNGs. This meant that you had to think about the pixel density of the device you were prototyping for. This was a real pain especially if you were repurposing prototype content between different devices. Importing PNG’s only also meant that you couldn’t take advantage of many of the interactions that ProtoPie has to offer such as being able to animate attributes of borders and fills.
That however is all a thing of the past now as all graphics that were previously imported as PNGs are now imported as SVGs. Any SVG once imported can be converted into a native ProtoPie vector which allows you to take advantage of various interactions.
