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.
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.
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 Sjölander, 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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Can they fix file navigation next? I’ve never been able to figure it out, somehow I can have files shared with me that are impossible to browse/ search for, you just have to bookmark the link.
I think this is why they’re making dev mode distinct from other modes. As others have mentioned though, this comes with several friction points and may actually be more confusing than the people at Figma expected.
That’s not unreasonable or anything either. This is a hard thing to do, UI/UX wise, and it’s a complex set of features being added to an already complex application. It’ll take time to iron out, but hopefully it winds up landing nicely like past features in figma have, rather than like I’d expect adobe features to land.
evolve2k|2 years ago
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...
karaterobot|2 years ago
throwaway3821|2 years ago
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 Sjölander, 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
raincole|2 years ago
A thousand times better than not reacting at all and leave Figma to die?
alberth|2 years ago
Just like Github vs open source Gitea alternative.
dnissley|2 years ago
ImPostingOnHN|2 years ago
dbbk|2 years ago
yewenjie|2 years ago
victornomad|2 years ago
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...
willsmith72|2 years ago
waffl|2 years ago
temporalparts|2 years ago
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/8/23810981/eu-probe-investig...
Oarch|2 years ago
sdflhasjd|2 years ago
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|2 years ago
cfcfcf|2 years ago
https://www.figma.com/pricing/
iamcalledrob|2 years ago
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|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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ajhurliman|2 years ago
lsajdn872he|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
pcurve|2 years ago
steve_adams_86|2 years ago
That’s not unreasonable or anything either. This is a hard thing to do, UI/UX wise, and it’s a complex set of features being added to an already complex application. It’ll take time to iron out, but hopefully it winds up landing nicely like past features in figma have, rather than like I’d expect adobe features to land.
wiesson|2 years ago
spongeb00b|2 years ago
kveykva|2 years ago
capableweb|2 years ago
ryanwhitney|2 years ago
Anyone actually using Dev Mode? How’s it helping you?
(Not an astroturf; I’m in the former camp myself.)
robertoandred|2 years ago
And I still get lost trying to find animation prototypes, durations, timing functions, etc
isuckatcoding|2 years ago
b33j0r|2 years ago
[deleted]
jordigh|2 years ago
[deleted]
0l|2 years ago
[deleted]
ramesh31|2 years ago
mvdtnz|2 years ago
graypegg|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]