[HN Gopher] Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform
___________________________________________________________________
Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform
Author : wiradikusuma
Score : 1026 points
Date : 2022-09-15 13:03 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (penpot.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (penpot.app)
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| I was just thinking that I should finally learn to use Figma, but
| now I think that I might as well learn PenPot, hopefully the
| recent news will make this open source tool grow (I didn't know
| it, for starters).
| neoberg wrote:
| They seem to be working as a company. Does anyone know what their
| business model is? I'm interested in contributing but I want to
| know this before I do.
| TuringTest wrote:
| As I understand it, they're a startup with an astonishing
| ability to convince investors to fund open source tools, and
| they're able to set up an economically sustainable environment
| around those.
| malermeister wrote:
| How do they make it economically sustainable? Where does the
| money come from after the initial investment?
| joelrunyon wrote:
| Is there a FOSS version of webflow?
| hiidrew wrote:
| curious about this as well. hopefully it's next. webflow is
| pretty nice to use for a non-developer but the subscription
| pricing is hefty.
| matdehaast wrote:
| Oleg is creating https://webstudio.is/ which I think is that.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Right in time to become a good option now that Adobe is trying to
| acquire Figma.
| margarina72 wrote:
| Well a good move on penpot would be to see how to get this figma
| file import [1] feature some resources, maybe even open a
| fundraising for this feature. I am pretty sure the general dismay
| would help gaining some momentum for any kind of funding.
|
| 1: https://tree.taiga.io/project/penpot/us/1469
| pietroppeter wrote:
| so, who has actually tried this and has anything to say about it?
| (besides the fact that is very funny to see it #2 with the sale
| of figma being #1)
| simulo wrote:
| I tried it!
|
| Good:
|
| - It is a good copy of figmas UI. With much open source
| software, it often seems the UI comes last in priority and
| interest; Penpot's UI is well working and looks good. - Basic
| features are all there - The team has build an open source
| online platform before, so they know what they do.
|
| Bad:
|
| - In design systems particularly at variants and states of
| components, it is not on figma's level yet
|
| Interesting:
|
| - You can self-deploy (cause open) or use their free instance -
| Front- and backend are written in clojure/clojure script
| hectormalot wrote:
| I've used it for some designs and found it quite easy to work
| with. UI is very good (vs typical open source)
|
| Challenging is the Figma ecosystem taking most mindshare. Eg
| trying to find someone on Fiverr to create PenPot designs is
| hard.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| This is the beauty of FOSS. It might be rough at the edges but
| you can always have access to it and not have to worry about
| losing your daily driver (talking to you Figma). Every
| organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in
| good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business
| continuity risk.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > Every organization needs to start thinking about this and
| invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid
| business continuity risk.
|
| As far as a business is concerned, Figma is still available.
| There is no business continuity risk.
|
| I personally, would say open source provides a much larger
| business continuity risk. There are many open source projects
| that are basically dead. They're widely used and quite crucial
| but development and support has basically stopped the
| maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things
| they want to do.
|
| A good example would be the Gorilla libraries in Go, it is
| still being maintained but the fact the maintainer has been
| looking for such a long time for someone else to take over
| because they don't have the time really means the library is
| just kinda existing.
|
| There is a popular User library for the Symfony framework in
| PHP, it literally says in the docs that people are expected to
| move off of it because they won't maintain it and lists a bunch
| of reasons why. How many teams using that library would even
| know that?
|
| One of the biggest complaints I've seen open soure maintainers
| complain about is people asking if their project is dead or
| not. As far as the maintainer is concerned it's maintained,
| when they have time. But it looks to the world that it is dead.
|
| Just because you can get the source code and use it at any time
| because the license allows it doesn't mean you're able to
| depend on it. In fact, since you're often paying no one for it
| and most often not even said thanks to anyone (myself
| included). You're entitled to nothing, no support, no note that
| they won't be maintaining it, etc.
|
| It annoys me when people think that FOSS means it's something
| you can depend on, when it literally comes with a license that
| makes sure you understand there is no warranty. That's how much
| you can depend on it. The person giving it to you says use at
| your own risk.
| infamia wrote:
| > I personally, would say open source provides a much larger
| business continuity risk.
|
| I feel the opposite, open source gives people and companies
| options and the ability to soldier on if someone loses
| interest in a technology. This site is littered with notices
| from companies that they intend to discontinue some paid
| product or service suddenly with very little notice. If a
| group of people or companies really care about an open source
| technology, it's easy enough for them to ensure the continued
| maintenance of something they're getting for free. Also, if
| you care deeply about a technology, chances are others do as
| well and those projects will continue well past what a
| commercial vendor would maintain.
| TuringTest wrote:
| > They're widely used and quite crucial but development and
| support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on
| with their lifes and have other things they want to do.
|
| So, you've never had a commercial proprietary library your
| core product depends upon, being obsoleted and ceased
| support, without a license nor access to the code to keep
| maintaining it in-house? Because it happens, and I have.
|
| And it's not just because the library was commercially
| inefficient, but because it got bought by a competing large
| corporation, who wanted to replace it in the market with
| their own solution, and wouldn't bother to support the
| library for its old users.
|
| When this happens, at least the open source license allows
| you to keep supporting your use case by yourself, instead of
| being forced into the new solution being pushed by the
| vendor.
| acomjean wrote:
| In biology almost nobody pays for software. A lot of it is
| really rough around the edges (I have to install and try to run
| some of it as part of my job).
|
| It's kinda interesting, most development is by grants and such,
| they don't offer much in the way of support funding. A lot of
| development is fooling around taking output from a and making
| it work for b.
| bolt7469 wrote:
| _rough at the edges_
|
| That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use
| these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an
| objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing
| value with it.
| dmantis wrote:
| If you are a company and not an individual, nobody prohibits
| you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs
| instead of paying some try-to-hook-you-up-with-subscriptions
| company.
|
| Moreover, lots of OSS contributors are from China, Russia,
| India, Ukraine, etc - so a company may spend even less paying
| them for particular commits than buying software from bay
| area company.
|
| It's more about management mindset rather than insolvable
| problem.
|
| upd: And everybody wins - more quality OSS code, help
| developers in poor countries, less money to shitty companies
| like Adobe.
| lowercased wrote:
| > nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to
| focus on your needs
|
| company or individual, that's true. but there's still big
| opportunity costs and time factors. Pay someone $1000 now
| to perhaps get some polish/bugfixes in a release 2 months
| from now... and do what in the meantime? Deal with 15% more
| time spent in sub-par-for-my-needs software?
|
| You _can_ , but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just
| because you paid that money, you may still not get things
| as you want (or when you want).
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| In one year you'll be one year older. Won't you wish
| you'd invested in yourself, org, and community?
|
| It's a marshmallow test for adults.
| desindol wrote:
| I donated like 4K early into GIMP 15 years later it's
| still an unusable mess in a professional environment.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I use it every day to edit my photos, and create/edit
| images, things it does well. Thank you.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Won't you wish you'd invested in yourself, org, and
| community?
|
| Many might prefer to have shipped features/products in a
| timely manner instead and how their performance reviews
| would look, as opposed to some notion of community.
|
| The situations where you can say: "I'm blocked and am
| waiting on the library/tool developer to have a look at
| my GitHub issue, so no new release will be shipped until
| then," are probably not plentiful. Situations where the
| person in question can contribute a solution of their own
| are also not as plentiful as we might like. Situations
| where the person in question is capable of either solving
| the problem just for themselves (with a custom build of
| the tool/library) are also not as plentiful as one might
| hope, due to possibly different skillsets.
|
| Making the functionality someone else's problem behind a
| contract of some sort feels like a decent choice in an
| enterprise setting, which is why you see many purchase
| something like RHEL licenses because of the support, or
| why many prefer to overpay for cloud services instead of
| running everything on prem, or even use paid tools that
| are "standard" within the niche of the industry that they
| work in.
|
| For many, the circumstances in which they'll adopt FOSS
| primarily centers around someone else already having done
| the majority of the work and the solution being good
| enough: something like MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL in the
| database space and something like Angular/Vue/React in
| the front end space, or any number of
| libraries/frameworks for back end development, tools like
| Visual Studio Code or Git, OSes like GNU/Linux or other
| Linux distros and so on.
|
| One might also argue that a lot of the successful FOSS
| projects out there actually have corporate backing, but
| perhaps that's besides the point.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Those folks can contribute a few dollars a month.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| But this point from the comment shouldn't be overlooked:
|
| > You can, but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just
| because you paid that money, you may still not get things
| as you want (or when you want).
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| True with proprietary software as well. Some even charge
| money and sell you to others via advertising surveillance
| at the same time.
| troyvit wrote:
| I don't think I've ever successfully gotten a SaaS or
| other paid product to fix a bug for me. I mean sure I've
| paid a lot to upgrade _hoping_ that an upgrade comes with
| bug fixes, but that usually doesn't pan out either. On
| the other hand I've seen great responsiveness on open
| source projects.
| newsclues wrote:
| Hire devs and use OSS as a base to create the tools you
| need!
| asgraham wrote:
| Sure, this is ideal given unlimited time and money, but
| hiring dedicated devs for tooling is going to be
| _expensive._ And once they fix "the problem," they're
| still on payroll. Yay they'll keep fixing problems and
| improving the software, but it's basically the most
| expensive software subscription model imaginable.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Good thing they invented contracting... several hundred
| years ago?
| bolt7469 wrote:
| Contracting requires the devs to get up to speed on the
| software and your company needs. On the other hand, a
| private company selling commercial software has a
| comparative advantage in already knowing the codebase and
| user needs.
|
| 10 companies each contracting 1 dev for an open-source
| project is a less-efficient allocation of resources than
| 1 company hiring 10 devs for their commercial software
| project.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Lost in the noise when the community is large enough.
| bolt7469 wrote:
| I'd appreciate it if you could provide some evidence for
| your claim that comparative advantage is "lost in the
| noise."
|
| Efficient allocation of scarce resources is best achieved
| with comparative advantages. A commercial software team
| has shared context, management, and knowledge that cannot
| be as efficiently achieved by a decentralized community
| of contributors. So the commercial team can produce the
| same software at a cheaper cost. This is a good thing for
| the economy.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Design tools are a multi-billion dollar market in just
| the US, and useful worldwide. Potential resources are not
| even a bit scarce.
|
| Figma already did the hard work of prod/tech design and
| fixing browsers, meaning followers will have a much
| easier path. https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-
| professional-design-...
|
| The same short-term thinking has been espoused at the
| dawn of every innovation. Thankfully some folks don't
| listen.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Hire dairy farmers to get the milk for your coffee -
| absolute insight into how it's produced. Also they got to
| raise cows from calves so no milk in the office for a
| while. But once you get it you can be sure it's organic !
|
| That's not even going into the dev market situation right
| now ...
|
| I mean seriously have you people ever been near a
| situation where these kind of decisions are made ?
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Economics prohibits it. Consider a feature that will cost 1
| month of developer time, let's put that at $10k. 20
| companies using the product want that feature, and each
| would be willing to pay $1k for it. No problem, right? The
| community would be willing to pay $20k total, and the
| feature would only cost $10k to implement, so why can't it
| get done?
|
| It can't get done because every company wants to let some
| other sucker pay for the feature, and then free-ride after
| it's implemented. No individual company would pay the $10k,
| because the feature is only worth $1k to them, even though
| it's worth $20k to society.
| cycomanic wrote:
| But on the other hand a lot of companies are quite happy
| to pay a subscription of 1000k a year (which increases if
| the company grows) to get the same features. Let's be
| real purchasing decisions are often not based primarily
| on economics otherwise companies wouldn't have large
| marketing and sales departments which throw huge parties
| at trade shows.
| bolt7469 wrote:
| In the long run, a company that wastes money on purchases
| will be beaten in the market by a company that isn't so
| wasteful. Marketing and sales is not wasteful, but
| actually creates profit.
| TuringTest wrote:
| I don't believe either of those are true. As it happens,
| the largest companies capture so much of the market that
| they can afford being inefficient, and they still have
| the power to push the competition into a corner.
|
| There are small-margin markets where this doesn't happen,
| bit then those markets don't have huge companies either.
| oever wrote:
| So how did Penpot come into existence? Because some
| 'sucker' paid for it?
|
| Kaleidos, the creators of Penpot, built a tool that they
| need and invested to make it open. And they get
| recognition for it which builds their brand and gets them
| more customers and employees.
|
| Paying for feature X and having that advertised in the
| ChangeLog and on the sponsors page is a sound business
| decision.
|
| Soon enough, businesses pay fees to Adobe only to have
| their data taken hostage in the cloud will be known as
| suckers.
| [deleted]
| andsoitis wrote:
| Project managing all the tools that we use to get our job
| done seems very distracting.
| capableweb wrote:
| Keep in mind that Figma was initially started in 2012, first
| public release in ~2016, while Penpot just got started in
| 2018. Figma has a bunch of years headstart on Penpot. Give
| them some years and I'm sure Penpot can achieve at least as
| much as Figma, if not more, because of the FOSS nature of the
| product.
| rglullis wrote:
| These people learn to hedge:
|
| - Take X% of what they pay to Figma/Adobe and donate to FOSS
| alternatives.
|
| - Every year, go through an exercise to look for missing
| features on the open source tool that still keeps you
| dependent on the proprietary one. Take the results from the
| feedback and give to the developers.
|
| - (If you are a big company) use the results of this exercise
| to try to negotiate down on the price of the proprietary
| system you depend on. If you manage to get a discount, take
| it and double down on the support of the free alternative.
|
| - Repeat until either you no longer need the proprietary
| solution or the open source alternative surpasses the closed
| one in capabilities _and market share_.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I feel like that is mainly in the consumer application space,
| things that have a user interface; everyone's favorite
| developer tooling, languages, CLI apps, etc are mostly open
| source.
| greyhair wrote:
| The analogy for me has always been Snap-On hand tools vs
| Craftsman. If you are making a living twisting wrenches eight
| hours a day, six days a week, the wrench you use really does
| matter.
| bearmode wrote:
| >It might be rough at the edges
|
| Often it's not just "rough around the edges", but fully missing
| features that are necessary (or STRONGLY desired) for a regular
| professional's workflow
| jbaczuk wrote:
| FOSS has risks too.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Specially the risk of becoming a much better alternative.
| type0 wrote:
| Yes, it can even cause you to drop out of college
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799090
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Yeah I feel sick every time people pride FOSS/OSS only from
| consumers' perspective. While there's just a few way to
| financially sustain projects.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| Yeah, risk for the proprietary competition.
| alberth wrote:
| It doesn't have the network effect.
|
| Folks seem to fail to realize that open source project fail when
| it comes to collaboration products, not because the tech is worse
| (many times the open source tech might be better), they fail
| because of the lack of network effects they have achieved.
|
| This is why Slack/FB/Github flourish, while open source
| alternatives don't.
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| GitHub fails as a collab tool and has no network effect?
| Interesting perspective, I guess.
| alberth wrote:
| I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying that Github has
| flourished _because_ of it 's network effect vs alternatives.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As usual, when money talks, we get FOSS posts with a subset of
| the capabilities of the real thing.
|
| Naturally everyone will do donations to support the upstream
| development going forward.
| rvz wrote:
| > As usual, when money talks, we get FOSS posts with a subset
| of the capabilities of the real thing.
|
| This. They're right you know. The same thing happened with
| LibreOffice, GIMP and InkScape. Even if you have an installed
| version of them, they don't come any where near the features of
| 'the real thing' and users will complain why it is not
| Office(r) 365 or the real Photoshop(r), or actually Figma(r).
|
| On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have done
| nothing to combat the move to online versions of Microsoft
| Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no need for the
| user to install anything which will always be ahead of manually
| installing these apps.
|
| The only exception to this is Blender, but as always with
| specialist software it is used by a small amount of users
| compared to the applications that I have described.
|
| As for Penpot, it just tells me that the Figma users that are
| 'upset' over Adobe today are just going to keep using Figma
| anyway and are just reacting over the news of the acquisition,
| since Penpot still doesn't meet the requirements and vast
| capabilities of Figma.
| buovjaga wrote:
| > On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have
| done nothing to combat the move to online versions of
| Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no
| need for the user to install anything which will always be
| ahead of manually installing these apps.
|
| An online version of LibreOffice has been available since
| 2017 and now there is even a WebAssembly version in
| development.
| TuringTest wrote:
| > On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have
| done nothing to combat the move to online versions of
| Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no
| need for the user to install anything which will always be
| ahead of manually installing these apps.
|
| The point of FLOSS software is not to prevent proprietary
| tools from existing, it's to make sure that a Free&Open
| alternative exists if you don't want them.
| njsubedi wrote:
| Another great open source product from the company. Their open
| source project management software, Taiga (taiga.io), is a
| fantastic tool that I have used for several years. Feature-wise
| it's the most matured software out there, and runs blazing fast.
| bhu1st wrote:
| Checked Taiga, looks decent. On a side note glad to see your
| username pop up here. Where are you these days? Let's catch up.
| njsubedi wrote:
| Uh oh, good to see you here, bro! I'm in Pokhara.. I'll ping
| you when I get to Ktm.
| rapnie wrote:
| If you want to ask questions, have feedback, Penpot recently
| started a community on this Discourse forum:
| https://community.penpot.app
| mdaniel wrote:
| holy bright pink, batman :-(
| capableweb wrote:
| Sounds like they have a interesting history behind the creation
| of Penpot:
|
| > Penpot was (effectively) born in a Kaleidos personal innovation
| week (PIWEEK, aka recurring hackathon) in 2018. Back then we had
| been recently forced to break one of our sacred rules at the
| company "only open source tools and platforms are allowed to
| build technology" due to F1gm4's overwhelmingly productivity
| boost for designers at the company. "We are second-class citizens
| in open source, it's frustrating and it's painful!" they cried,
| and they were right.
|
| https://kaleidos.net/ seems like an interesting place to work as
| well.
|
| Gonna be exciting to see where Penpot moves from here. I'm a 100%
| Figma user who just signed up for Penpot and gonna see if it's
| possible to adopt for my own workflows.
|
| Particularly interesting for me as a Clojure/Script developer is
| that Penpot is written in Clojure and ClojureScript, but the
| average user won't care about that. But will also be interesting
| to see if they'll be able to keep iterating at the same speed as
| they currently are, and how the language will affect it.
| ithrow wrote:
| I don't see how Clojurescript is a good thing here, it's
| probably the most inefficient and with the most overhead of all
| the compile to JS languages (with out talking too much about
| react with penpot uses), even highly optimized pure JS won't
| come anywhere near the performance of Figma's C++ engine. Yes,
| performance for this tools matters.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Clojuescript is definitely not the most inefficient compile-
| to-js language. For example, the default data types will be
| well-designed with persistent data-structures instead of eg
| singly linked lists. But maybe you're limiting to some subset
| in which clojurescript is the slowest.
| capableweb wrote:
| Time will tell. Currently Penpot is using SVG for rendering
| the canvas, while Figma is using HTML <canvas> element for
| rendering the canvas, with their own custom engine. I don't
| know anything about what Penpot is planning, but I'm still
| excited to see what a SVG canvas could possibly do in
| competition to Figmas own renderer.
|
| And then the rest of the UI is just basic HTML which any
| framework/compile-to-js language could handle. It's all about
| the canvas, and browsers are arguably pretty efficient at
| render SVGs so again, time will tell what happens.
| javchz wrote:
| I've been testing penpot, and yes, you can feel a
| performance penalty for using SVG instead of Canvas... but
| only after having like 20 screens or more.
|
| For smaller projects, weirdly enough it's even faster than
| figma. Specially initial loading times, and switching
| between project selection, and loading the project. I think
| I'm gonna use it more for when I have a quick idea, and
| want to draft something quickly before lose it, just
| because of that.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| I love that FOSS exists and helps fight centralization and
| stagnation, but I worry that it will be seen as an example of
| competition. I have to wonder if this is one of the driving
| forces behind the epidemic of relicensing to be able to compete.
| If you can't seriously compete in a marketplace because the
| competition is overpowered, then taking some of the most popular
| FOSS solutions private and paid ends up being one of the only
| real ways to compete, and one of the only ways for those
| contributors to feel adequately compensated for their efforts.
|
| I have to wonder if stricter antitrust could help push back
| against some of the erosion of FOSS licenses (IMO) that we've
| seen in recent years. The whole "build something to compete with
| X and get your exit by being acquired by X" strategy can't be
| long-term sustainable, can it?
| shash7 wrote:
| Thank the lord. After the acquisition, this is definitely
| something I'm looking into.
| dsmmcken wrote:
| Looks like you can self host with a docker container. That's very
| cool.
|
| Can I import from figma?
| simulo wrote:
| No - there was some discussion on such a feature, but im/Export
| from/to such complex formats is very difficult and often
| impossible to get perfectly right.
| dsmmcken wrote:
| That's unfortunate. I have one large file that contains
| everything for a particular project. I migrated from Sketch
| to Figma a couple years ago and did so using their import. It
| was not perfect, but was better than nothing. It took a few
| days to clean it up again, but was a good starting point for
| migration. As the file has years of work in it, starting over
| would be a significant amount of work.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I've always heard that "perfect is the enemy of good" and in
| my experience as long as the tool communicates "I did what I
| could, and didn't know what to do with the following
| elements" then clear communication can go a long way toward
| allowing users to make informed decisions
| js4ever wrote:
| It's really a fantastic tool, we are using it since several
| months in replacement of figma and Adobe XD. The prototype
| feature is working great as well.
| NaN1352 wrote:
| Can you do auto layouts? And components like figma?
| TuringTest wrote:
| It has some support for reusable components, just not
| interactive ones (that's on the roadmap).
| simulo wrote:
| It can do components like figma, it does not have autolayout
| and component variants yet.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| It seems like no :( I'm a big fan of the auto layout feature
| in Figma and Framer, in fact I've started getting the
| designers at my workplace to use it in lieu of fixed pixel
| values. Would love to switch to a FOSS solution, but that one
| missing feature is a blocker for me, for now.
| jameschensmith wrote:
| While I find it awesome to see Penpot getting some recognition
| right now, it is not at the point of being a Figma replacement
| just yet. But I'm very hopeful that it will eventually be. Once
| they get a plugin system implemented, I'll be recommending it to
| all my colleagues.
| Kukumber wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844338 :)
| snapetom wrote:
| Maybe I'm using it wrong and it was never intended for this, but
| when I tried Penpot about a year ago, I had no way to export the
| diagram as one file like PDF or JPG. I could only export a layer.
| Did I miss something or am I not understanding what Penpot is
| for?
| simulo wrote:
| You can export each artboard. Usually, there would be one
| design/variant/mockup on one artboard. This is the same model
| of export as figma does it.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Adobe trying to pay $20B dollars to buy a designer tool meanwhile
| I am still pushing in prod code I wrote using vim
| riddleronroof wrote:
| Haha this. And now someone put copilot in vim.
| capableweb wrote:
| Copilot have existed in vim since the public launch, or am I
| missing something?
| polyamid23 wrote:
| https://github.com/github/copilot.vim
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Is it code for a designer tool that Adobe just paid $20B for?
| sirjaz wrote:
| The biggest issue I see with this is that it is web-based. It
| should be decentralized and have a native desktop client. 70% of
| the world has crappy internet, and if your connection goes down
| you are sol.
| azemetre wrote:
| Interesting choice in tech they are using, I wanted to contribute
| but I don't know any clojure or clojurescript.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Shameless plug but I interviewed Pablo for my podcast
| https://flagsmith.com/podcast/pablo-muzquiz-penpot/
|
| He's a mega interesting guy; it was a super fascinating 50
| minutes of my life!
| devteambravo wrote:
| I'm dismayed at the Figma news. I do not like Adobe. Hi PenPot,
| will be switching to you. I wish your name wasn't so close
| sounding to polpot.
| overlisted wrote:
| For people looking at this post in the future, here's why it's so
| funny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850178
| gardaani wrote:
| How they pay the hosting and storage fees? What is the business
| model?
| kozhevnikov wrote:
| https://help.penpot.app/faqs/#how-is-penpot-sustainable
| simulo wrote:
| I _guess_ they will offer premium accounts for a fee at some
| point, just like they do for their other project, Taiga.io
|
| There is an interview on the company's sustainability and
| strategy with its founder at
| https://opensource.com/article/21/9/open-source-design
| syrusakbary wrote:
| I'm super excited about Penpot. It has a unique opportunity ahead
| to unite design and development workflows that I think very few
| people realize.
|
| Looking forward to what's coming next!
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I'm excited to see alternatives to Figma, because using it is
| like an emotional rollercoaster for me. There are times when I'll
| open a massive project file with hundreds of frames, each with
| thousands of graphical nodes. And even then, I can zoom in and
| out with no friction at all, it's just buttery smooth. I've been
| a developer for over a decade, and I have no idea _at all_ how
| they 're able to pull that off. It's a technical marvel.
|
| On the other hand, it's far from what I would want for a modern
| design tool. Managing tokens, or anything from the "design
| system" world, is an absolute headache. Compared to the
| efficiency of the dev tools I use, it feels like Figma (and every
| other design tool) is just light years behind.
|
| Even when I use a tool that's built _specifically for that
| purpose_ , like Supernova, I still feel pretty underwhelmed. I'm
| not sure exactly what I'm looking for, but I know that the
| current landscape doesn't cut it for me.
| protomolecule wrote:
| "I have no idea at all how they're able to pull that off"
|
| Just 2D hashing. Wrote a viewer once for chip topology files
| [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDSII
| sizzlordy wrote:
| I'm exactly the same as you @danielvaughn.
|
| I like Figma but everything in the design tools space feels
| like it light years behind dev tool. Particularly around
| anything to do with tokens.
|
| Tokens are just variables. Ideally you should be able to
| reference one token with another token (ala variables) and NO
| DESIGN TOOL DOES THIS. It's maddening.
| ojkelly wrote:
| In 2015 one of the founders wrote a really interesting post
| about how they did it [0].
|
| > Pulling this off was really hard; we've basically ended up
| building a browser inside a browser.
|
| [0] https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-
| design-...
| natatana wrote:
| Which can make sense on the short term, but on the long term
| I'm sure browsers' SVG renderer will catch-up and use GPU
| rendering in the spirit of pathfinder, piet-gpu, etc.
|
| This is why I think it is wise for Penpot to use the native
| browser SVG renderer. They can spend their limited ressources
| on making a cool app while the browsers will inevitably
| improve their vector renderer on their own
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Agreed, I really wish browsers spent more time developing
| SVG.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-15 23:01 UTC)