[HN Gopher] Figma makes 200 fixes and improvements to Dev Mode
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Figma makes 200 fixes and improvements to Dev Mode
Author : emilsjolander
Score : 107 points
Date : 2023-08-22 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (figma.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (figma.com)
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| I can guess what's coming next: dev mode will get locked behind
| the "editor" per user pricing and then it's going to become a
| pain getting stuff out of Figma.
|
| Also, there's an annoying "bug" in Figma when it tries to
| implement its own hotkeys: I have various Ctrl/Cmnd key combos
| swapped and hitting Ctrl causes Figma to de-select whatever I've
| highlighted so that trying to copy some portion of a colour code
| or whatever with Ctrl+C causes me to copy nothing but thin air.
| 542458 wrote:
| They already announced that in ~1 year dev mode will become a
| paid feature - 25 bucks a month per dev, or 35 if you're on the
| "enterprise" plan.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| $25/mth seems like an egregious price for such an unhelpful
| feature. I understand it will get better, but at this
| point... I can't imagine paying more than $5/mth on top of my
| current price assuming it was more polished.
|
| Maybe I'm not the target market. I can transcribe visuals to
| CSS and HTML fairly automatically due to so many years of
| doing it, and I can do it reliably and consistently in ways
| that fit various workflows and other challenges. I understand
| Figma probably wants dev mode to provide a source of truth
| and gradually add some show stopping features, but even
| then... $25 is so much. I already feel like Figma costs me
| more than I want to pay for it. Their pricing model is really
| aggressive.
| radley wrote:
| Dev Mode is included in the $15 per editor Professional
| tier.
|
| $25 Dev Mode stand-alone subscription is a less expensive
| option for Organization or Enterprise tiers, which are
| $45-75 per editor.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Ah. I feel silly now. Thanks for pointing that out, and
| I'll try to do my research next time.
| cfcfcf wrote:
| > In 2024, Dev Mode will be included in all editor seats or can
| be purchased separately for $25 per seat/month on Organization,
| and $35 per seat/month on Enterprise.
|
| https://www.figma.com/pricing/
| Aeolun wrote:
| Was Figma always so ridiculously expensive? I guess it's no
| surprise my company doesn't want all the devs to have editor
| seats.
| evolve2k wrote:
| Broadly this is great to see and I'm sure the team has worked
| hard on this.
|
| But can't help but feel like this is a bit of knee jerk reaction
| to the growth of the much smaller open source product Penpot,
| that's received increasing interest and even some funding since
| the Figma sale was announced.
|
| Penpot has bet on making all the controls match the html/css spec
| as well as save everything as svg, in short having a big focus on
| making devs first class stakeholders.
|
| This feels like a late response following Penpot Fest that ran
| recently and announced many cool dev features.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgcCPfOv5v56-fghJo2dHNB...
| alberth wrote:
| Aren't there network effects to using Figma, that a self-hosted
| version of Penpot will never benefit from?
|
| Just like Github vs open source Gitea alternative.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| I think the main blockers are the pain of re-learning the
| software, and migrating things over. Lots of designers have
| down this already in the last few years from sketch.
|
| It's like software frameworks where young designers want to
| learn the most popular, coolest tool to help find a job, and
| companies want to use the most popular, coolest tool to help
| with hiring.
|
| I don't think it being self-hosted changes this for better or
| worse, but they still have a tough task ahead to get a
| critical-mass switching.
| chupchap wrote:
| UI is very similar so the learning curve is not steep
| guideamigo wrote:
| GitHub is too cheaply priced to disrupt. IMHO, Figma is
| expensive and Dev mode is poor.
| delfinom wrote:
| Figma isn't a collaborative platform beyond your own project,
| it isn't a GitHub, it's for propertiary design of your
| products.
|
| The only thing Penpot has to do is "disrupt" the pricing
| equation and some businesses will pick it up to save some
| bucks, heck to even retain independent control.
| dnissley wrote:
| Wouldn't that be a good thing? Armchair regulators have been
| booing the Adobe acquisition on the grounds of "something
| something competition" -- this seems to prove that yes, indeed,
| great design tools can still be created in a post Adobe Figma
| world, and those upstarts can spur Figma to continue to
| compete.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| this feels like an advertisement for a "competitor", barely and
| thinly veiled as a comment on the topic
| raincole wrote:
| > a bit of knee jerk reaction to the growth of the much smaller
| open source product Penpot
|
| A thousand times better than not reacting at all and leave
| Figma to die?
| throwaway3821 wrote:
| Posting anonymously as I have made some investments in the
| design tooling space.
|
| Overall I don't see Penpot being a realistic competitor to
| Figma, and I can't see this as being something that was done as
| a knee jerk reaction to Penpot's social success.
|
| First, why it isn't a realistic competitor. While building
| everything out leveraging SVG as its main rendering engine
| allows for parity with code as an advantage, the inherent
| disadvantage it has is handling large files. For larger design
| teams, files often have thousands of designs and pages. Sketch
| has an advantage here over Figma primarily because it has a
| higher upper bound on possible memory that it can allocate to
| each file. Penpot not only has the memory restrictions Figma
| does (since it operates in the browser), it's also tied to the
| browser rendering performance of SVG, which simply wasn't
| designed for the scale designers operate at. It tends to get
| extremely slow once you have 50 or so pages in a single
| artboard. This means realistically, Penpot is competing for the
| casual design market, rather than the larger enterprise-scale
| design market. Figma's approach for this market has always been
| to use it as a top-of-funnel expansion opportunity, which is
| why their free tier targets these users. In general it's very
| hard to compete with something that is both industry-standard,
| and free. Penpot theoretically offers more functionality than
| the Figma free tier, but since it can't support the scale that
| Sketch/Figma does for larger files, it greatly narrows the
| market they're targeting. The market for users who want to
| build extremely advanced designs, but who also want to create
| extremely small files, is a narrow group.
|
| Second, with regards to this being a knee-jerk reaction to
| Penpot's dev tooling, the dates just don't line up. Penpot
| really exploded in reaction to the Adobe acquisition
| announcement in late 2022, but Figma acquired a YC company
| known as Visly in 2021. Visly was apparently working on some
| design->code elements, which was really the first inkling that
| Figma was exploring this. It seems like this was being worked
| on / thought about long before Penpot took off. Given the
| submitter of this story appears to be Emil Sjolander, one of
| the Visly founders, I suspect that it's a fair assumption that
| Visly turned into Figma's Dev Mode feature:
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/visly
| tobr wrote:
| > it's also tied to the browser rendering performance of SVG,
| which simply wasn't designed for the scale designers operate
| at. It tends to get extremely slow once you have 50 or so
| pages in a single artboard
|
| Haven't tried Penpot so this is in the hypothetical, but
| surely not all of that needs to be kept around as full live
| SVG trees? You could draw the SVG to a canvas and keep it
| static until it changes.
| diacritica wrote:
| Penpot's CEO here. In terms of the knee jerk reaction, it's
| hard to say but we have the impression that there is some of
| it in terms of priorities, particularly long-awaited flex-
| layout-ish capabilities, for instance. Let's not forget that
| Penpot is an open source project that has been sharing its
| code and roadmap way before the Adobe/Figma deal.
|
| Regarding the "isn't a realistic competitor" point. You bet
| we are! The only realistic competitor in a while, actually,
| because we come from a deep understanding of how cross-
| functional teams address design & code instead of doubling
| down on silos or "modes". To be successful you need to do
| things VERY differently.
|
| - We're open source and we're enjoying an extremely active
| community of contributors.
|
| - We rely on open standards so designers (and organisations)
| can own their future while developers can treat design files
| as first class citizens in a git repo if they want to.
|
| - You can use SaaS or self-host, we don't care about your
| deployment strategy.
|
| - We bring code vocabulary and abstractions to the design
| process (see Flex Layout or upcoming Grid Layout
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx0ufKErqVk) so we get rid of
| the lost in translation issues that plague teams.
|
| - We partner with people like Design Tokens (which are also
| open source) to build the future of Design Decisions so we
| can transcend the current status quo of design systems.
|
| Yes, of course we have performance challenges with SVG on
| browsers (not Figma 2MB WASM memory limits, though, since we
| can access DOM memory availability which is now 16GB!) but
| these are temporary engineering challenges and we're working
| super hard on cracking them.
|
| I'm fine having these debates on whether Penpot is a viable
| competitor to Figma, it's healthy and I get it, it happens
| all the time when new tools pop up (sometimes signalling the
| end of a cycle, even if it's not sudden). But what really
| matters to us at Penpot is that this goes beyond "competing"
| with a particular tool, this is about a specific world vision
| on how designers and developers want to collaborate to scale
| up design and software building.
|
| And a key ingredient to all this is "what are developers
| going to do?" That's the real battleground out there.
| Developers outnumber Designers 10 to 1. People that keep
| wondering why Adobe paid $20B for Figma tend to miss the
| point. It's the developers, obviously! Of course they are
| worth $20B when you're not exciting to them!
|
| This is not a static picture, it never was and it never is.
| Every single day we keep working hard on building the best
| design & prototyping tool for designers and developers, every
| single day we're re-balancing the status quo. It's already
| paying off with 400K+ users worldwide, half of them on self-
| host.
|
| To be honest, we can't be more excited about everything
| that's going on and what's making everything worth it's not
| just the growing community of users and contributors but the
| amazing quality of it, these are not casual users coming for
| the free stuff, these are forward thinkers really getting it!
| infamia wrote:
| > Penpot really exploded in reaction to the Adobe acquisition
| announcement in late 2022, but Figma acquired a YC company
| known as Visly in 2021.
|
| It is not mutually exclusive that Figma bought Visly in 2021
| and these features are in reaction to/are copying Penpot.
| Given the gap of three years between this post while owning
| Visly makes it more plausible.
| karaterobot wrote:
| That's not been my impression as a designer. Outside of HN,
| I've not seen anybody talk about switching to Penpot. My team
| even looked at it and concluded it was several evolutionary
| steps from being an option. It's not a viable replacement for
| Figma yet. To be clear, I'd love it if it were, because I want
| competition in a space Adobe is trying to monopolize, I just
| don't feel like Penpot is providing that pressure at this
| point.
| pcurve wrote:
| I haven't seen anyone switch to Penpot either, but it's clear
| Figma has been borrowing things from Penpot, which is
| actually great.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| I see Penpot primarily taking Figma's market share around the
| edges. For established design teams with robust workflow
| needs, there's no competition right now despite some of
| Penpot's novel design features like grid layout. For
| independents, enthusiasts, and teams running on a shoestring,
| however (read: Figma's free-tier customers), it becomes
| considerably more compelling as a potential alternative.
|
| To paraphrase Reed Hastings' classic line: Penpot needs to
| become Figma before Figma can become Penpot.
| yewenjie wrote:
| Has anybody here successfully migrated from Figma to Penpot?
| kuon wrote:
| We tried, but we hit a blocking issue where undo would wipe
| the entire canvas.
| dbbk wrote:
| I very much doubt they are worried about an obscure open source
| project.
| isuckatcoding wrote:
| "Developers go back and fix tech debt and shortcuts accrued due
| to short release timeline"
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Pour one out for the ticket factory devs over there
| graypegg wrote:
| Are the teams working on Figma known to be like that? I've only
| heard good things about Figma honestly, but all before the
| purchase by Adobe.
| jjcm wrote:
| PM over here at Figma. We don't have dedicated bug teams
| whose only job is to fix incoming bugs. Feature teams are
| responsible for their own bugs, so we typically have an ebb
| and flow of feature work vs quality work.
|
| Quality is also pretty high on our pri list for leadership,
| so we typically don't have pushback if we want to focus on
| bug fixing vs pursuing new features.
|
| Also just FYI, the purchase hasn't gone through yet.
| graypegg wrote:
| Hey that sounds more like what I've heard then! :)
|
| And as for the pending Adobe buy-out... you can't say it
| out-loud, but I can: I really hope they treat you folks
| right, but I doubt they will. Figma is awesome. Probably
| too good for a company as famous for it's customer hatred
| as Adobe.
| [deleted]
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| They're known for consistently shipping significant new
| features fast, so call it what you want but whatever they do
| works!
|
| What you really don't want is to work at a ticket factory
| where every ticket is for a new hack that could be avoided by
| paying down basic technical debt :)
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >consistently shipping significant new features fast
|
| This is an external result of talent. However, it's also an
| external result of bad management. From the outside, we
| can't see how much of column A and how much of column B it
| really is, until the day we notice superfluous features,
| weird UX, bugs, and fix timelines on the order of years.
| Figma _did_ give me almost 100% column-A vibes more than
| almost any other product I 've used, so I was quite
| optimistic, but since the buyout I've noticed a few
| bugs/UX-issues of the concerning variety, and regardless of
| whether that timing is a coincidence, I'm starting to worry
| that in the end it will just be more business as usual for
| this piece of software.
|
| Edit: Since the buyout _announcement_. But again, no idea
| if it 's related.
| [deleted]
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Heaven forbid developers be asked to demean themselves by doing
| such things as fixing bugs or shipping features.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| It's clear you've never experienced significant amounts of
| tech debt that you aren't allowed to fix because it doesnt
| Excel chart nicely for the boomers higher up who only see
| things in terms of "something working on the screen" or not.
|
| And no, I'm not going to rebel by secretly fixing it silently
| and unappreciatedly while peers pile on hacks and get
| promoted for things on the screen.
|
| Luckily Figma has a great engineering background as its basis
| with technical founders, so they can avoid becoming that, but
| not all companies are like that.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| This is a precise description of The Problem with software,
| and, as noted, Figma has (or had, depending on one's
| opinion) very good signaling that they are one of those
| minority companies that are avoiding The Problem. I don't
| agree with ramesh31's implication that this is what's
| happening just because the ticket count is large, but it is
| absolutely a valid concern, especially when it threatens
| such a superlative product.
| jordigh wrote:
| [flagged]
| 0l wrote:
| [flagged]
| jordigh wrote:
| Oh, but of course.
|
| Seriously, though, how did they come up with this name for
| the company?
| iamcalledrob wrote:
| I use Figma to design and then build what I design. This might be
| a bit unusual :)
|
| The switch to "Dev Mode" as a different modality has
| unfortunately been a bit frustrating, because I can no longer hop
| back and forth between designing and grabbing "developer" values
| (e.g. Android ARGB colour values). This means I'm toggling in and
| out of dev mode for only a few seconds.
|
| I wish the Figma team had found a way to introduce these features
| more contextually, rather than introducing a new modality.
| diacritica wrote:
| Those "modes" are extremely frustrating and represent a silo-
| based conception of how teams work. If the tools creates
| disconnects... the team gets disconnected, that's not progress
| at all.
| ryanwhitney wrote:
| Lots of people saying it's not for them.
|
| Anyone actually using Dev Mode? How's it helping you?
|
| (Not an astroturf; I'm in the former camp myself.)
| robertoandred wrote:
| It still feels super slow and heavy.
|
| And I still get lost trying to find animation prototypes,
| durations, timing functions, etc
| victornomad wrote:
| I was an early adopter of Figma. Unlike many designers, I chose
| not to use a Mac since I'm more attuned to Linux. So, when I
| discovered Figma as an alternative to Sketch, it felt like a
| breath of fresh air.
|
| Over the years, I've been a fan of most of Figma's updates, but
| the recent ones have been somewhat disappointing to me. The
| notable exception is the flex mode, which seems to draw
| inspiration from Penpot.
|
| As for the developer mode, I find it lackluster. Its primary
| value seems to be in its read-only mode. In the past, I addressed
| this by copying deliverables to a separate file to prevent
| accidental edits.
|
| Lately, I've observed more and more designers with coding skills
| or coders with design skills. When I work with people that they
| understand both worlds, I prefer workflows that incorporate Figma
| and Storybook, emphasizing code as the ultimate source of truth.
| I'd like to see more in this direction where there is no
| artificial barriers between coders and designers...
| wiesson wrote:
| Offtopic but is there a "Figma for 3d" app? (Yes, I'm looking for
| the 2023 version of Sketchup which was simple and easy to use)
| kveykva wrote:
| Spline and Vectary are both in this space
| capableweb wrote:
| "3D" is such a broad term though, What specifically you want to
| do?
| pcurve wrote:
| While some of these are great, I can't help but wonder if Figma
| is becoming more and more difficult to use for newer, less
| technically inclined users.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| Figma has been such a cool story, I'm so disappointed that the
| buyout wasn't blocked. Obviously it's an awesome tool and still
| getting better, but competition is a good thing and I'd really
| hoped in 5 years we'd have figma and others pushing adobe to be
| more innovative and user-friendly.
| temporalparts wrote:
| US DOJ is still looking into it and perhaps EU would prevail
| here.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/8/23810981/eu-probe-investig...
| Oarch wrote:
| The UK government has definitely scrutinised/continues to
| scrutinise the deal quite closely
| waffl wrote:
| Is it not still blocked, or at least under heavy scrutiny? I
| would also dread Figma being folded into Adobe's bloated
| ecosystem. Thank god for penpot as mentioned in another comment
| as I would need an alternative if Figma does indeed get taken
| over by Adobe.
| azemetre wrote:
| I bet Adobe would like to back out of the deal too, they paid
| an extreme premium before tech took a general nosedive. I
| doubt Figma is worth $20 billion in todays climate.
| paxys wrote:
| Maybe not on its own, but it is worth that much _to Adobe_
| because it threatens their core business.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Yeah, I saw this move as a general protective manoeuvre
| rather than an acquisition intended to become a cash cow
| in and of itself. Figma is remarkably useful and capable.
| Over the years I've found myself leaning on it more and
| more for things I didn't really expect to.
| imadj wrote:
| > I bet Adobe would like to back out of the deal too
|
| They don't, they already killed their Adobe Xd[0]. Even if
| it was still around, it was in a different league.
|
| So they very much betting on the deal, they don't want to
| be out of the UI/UX space entirely.
|
| [0] - The Silent End of Adobe XD:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36637055
| azemetre wrote:
| Interesting! I missed that last time around.
|
| I do wonder how Adobe will fare with empowered
| governments in the EU, UK, and US that want to thwart
| these types of acquisitions for big tech. Frankly I hope
| they succeed too. Mergers are not good for competitive
| markets and Adobe nearly owning every tool out their in
| the design space is extremely bad.
| [deleted]
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