+1.
I'm getting up to speed with Cocoa to the point where I might be faster than a designer with Photoshop... as long as we don't venture into wooden textures. :)
I think there's a difference between using Photoshop for exploratory purposes, and using Photoshop to produce a deliverable.
I know Chris Coyier is a fan of using photoshop to explore a little bit, before you get into the mode of writing code, which he thinks can interfere with your creative process.
For the vast majority of professional designers Photoshop is critical to creating design elements. Not everyone creates a final, pixel-perfect mockup in Photoshop, but those who don't use Photoshop for smaller parts of the design.
It is very common to screenshot your rendered HTML/CSS, take that into Photoshop, design one portion of the interface, then take that back to code.
Tell me what is fundamentally wrong with screenshotting an interface, playing with it a bit, coming up with something you like then turning it into code?
It's a lot of unnecessary, time-consimung back-and-forth that could be easily done in a program like Sketch.
Every approach is unique to its designer, and it's situation. But I have yet to (personally) find Photoshop (or a hybrid approach) more effective and time-saving when you deal with a large project. Artboards are MUCH easier to keep track of and group, and with something like Mirror [1] you will save hours in exporting/slicing/sharing over the course of a project.
Photoshop was not made for UI design. It can do it, but it will rarely be the best tool because Adobe is not catering features for that niche.
> Artboards are MUCH easier to keep track of and group, and with something like Mirror [1] you will save hours in exporting/slicing/sharing over the course of a project.
I'll go against the grain here and say that 80% of the UI design that I do is based in the browser.
Certainly getting a style and architecture down is helpful before hand but the design really doesn't come to life until I get into code. Some might say that this isn't sustainable on a large project but I'd argue that using HTML/CSS and github as a tool is just as, if not more, useful than photoshop/sketch/whatever.
Yes, actually the Sketch Manual [1] (but who reads the manual?) and (my favorite) community resources [2] that you can download, play with, and re-use over and over.
See the NoPSD movement: http://thoughtworks.github.io/p2/issue02/continuous-design/