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Serious question, what about Figma is unique to a cloud app over a desktop app with cloud features? Does it actually do some computations server side? Clearly t

Serious question, what about Figma is unique to a cloud app over a desktop app with cloud features? Does it actually do some computations server side? Clearly the Adobes of the world haven't gone whole hog into online first/collaborative editing (and probably never will due to inertia), but one can imagine someone more nimble doing so without running in a browser. Afaict the uniquely web thing about this product is the lack of install (and to be fair maybe that's a killer feature). Is that it or am I missing something.

epidemian 4y ago
> Serious question, what about Figma is unique to a cloud app over a desktop app with cloud features. There's probably nothing unique about it, but the server/browser model allows anyone on a team to access the Figma project as long as they have a web browser, while a classic client/server model would require a dedicated client software to be installed to access the project. On my last job, we switched from using Abstract for sharing designs between the designers and developers, to using Figma for both designing and sharing between all team members, and the switch was a huge success. Speaking for myself alone, the experience on Abstract was pretty terrible: the native application didn't have a Linux version, and the web client was dog-slow, buggy and limited in features. Figma, on the other hand, being the same web client for everyone, meant a pretty decent experience from the get go, which was a welcome change TBH.
karaterobot 4y ago
You can run Figma as a desktop app with cloud features. It's a wrapper around the same core as the web app of course. I'm fairly sure of that, though I guess I don't technically know that it's true. "Unique", I don't know. The advantage is that the cost to get people to engage with a design file is so low that it actually happens. It's just a link you click, and you're now looking at the design, or even a clickable prototype of the design. And I'm there, you can see my cursor zipping around, and you can leave a comment, or start a voice chat, and all of a sudden, I'll be damned we're collaborating. If it's a desktop app, and they have to download it, a lot of people just don't do that.
- exodust 4y ago
  > "you can see my cursor zipping around..." I've only used Figma a few times to review designs, but found this unsettling. Like if I was working away at my desk, and turned around to discover someone standing there watching me work. I would find that uncomfortable. In my case, I was the one that felt like I was spying on the designer working. I couldn't tell if they knew I was there. It seems like anyone with access to a particular project can watch the designer working away without being seen. Is this accurate? Is there a way to switch the multiplayer feature off?
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    I don't think you can turn it off, but what you can do is work in your Drafts folder, or work on a file that isn't shared. I've done this for designs I don't think are ready to be looked at. You can always know if somebody is watching your file, because their avatar picture pops up in the top right corner. You could miss noticing that, if you're really focused on something. But if someone is zoomed in far enough to be watching what you're doing, their cursor is probably going to be visible on your screen.
    - exodust 4y ago
      Thanks. I will explore the Drafts folder and other options. I will never be comfortable with my team members watching me work without my control over that. Unless of course we're on a call with the intent to collaborate and share in real time. Otherwise I'm not onboard the idea that "multiplayer" is the default way of working. My mouse movements and decision making at any given second in time are not inherently valuable, and are a mine to share, not Adobe's to publish. It bothers me that the likes of Adobe and others try so hard to push a paradigm that results in more data points for them. More spying windows into the designer's processes, right down to mouse movement and other details. I don't understand why designers are rushing to hand over such data to what is essentially a cloud service data miner, soon to be Adobe.
enra 4y ago
First Adobe lost digital product designers a decade ago. First to Sketch, and then to Figma. Photoshop/Illustrator wasn't really made for designing digital products. Photoshop's most features are built around photos, bitmaps and pixels, and the industry moved from pixels assets to vectors or rendered UI. Adobe didn't really have tool dedicated to digital products. They bought Fireworks in 2005 but then kind of killed it. They finally woke up in 2016 and introduced Adobe XD but it was too late and it product was meh. Also many designers also hate Adobe and their creative cloud to the Adobe brand didn't help either. Sketch came along with a tool for designing digital products, like websites, mobile apps etc. It was really good, but it was a native Mac application that dealt with local .sketch files. To share the design the person would need to send them the sketch file and they would generally the same major Sketch version installed on their Mac. They also were operating an "indie" team in the Netherlands and were kind of removed how Silicon Valley teams design and build products. When Figma came along, they were bit behind of Sketch in terms performance and design features, but they had the cloud/browser first architecture where there is no local files. There is no files on anyone computers, everyone in the company has access to all the files. There generally no versions, you edit the latest file. They also listened what product design teams actually needed. For example they came to the Airbnb design team to ask about what we would need for the design system and components, and then they basically built that (I assume they also talked to other teams). They also built simple prototyping tools which then killed Invision and the cottage industry of other prototyping tools. The web sharing and basic handoff tools kind of made Zeplin and Abstract obsolete. So in the end what Figma built was a design tool that product designers and the product teams needed. It had the cloud, collaboration and the features that work in a way that make sense how things are designed and built today. It's little bit like you can run your own git server and setup, but what Github build was the workflow and the tools for teams or groups of people to build things together. Adobe still operates in the world where they sell these specialized git clients for specific types of users for but there are no workflows or really a way to do anything together.

epidemian 4y ago

> Serious question, what about Figma is unique to a cloud app over a desktop app with cloud features. There's probably nothing unique about it, but the server/browser model allows anyone on a team to access the Figma project as long as they have a web browser, while a classic client/server model would require a dedicated client software to be installed to access the project. On my last job, we switched from using Abstract for sharing designs between the designers and developers, to using Figma for both designing and sharing between all team members, and the switch was a huge success. Speaking for myself alone, the experience on Abstract was pretty terrible: the native application didn't have a Linux version, and the web client was dog-slow, buggy and limited in features. Figma, on the other hand, being the same web client for everyone, meant a pretty decent experience from the get go, which was a welcome change TBH.

karaterobot 4y ago

You can run Figma as a desktop app with cloud features. It's a wrapper around the same core as the web app of course. I'm fairly sure of that, though I guess I don't technically know that it's true. "Unique", I don't know. The advantage is that the cost to get people to engage with a design file is so low that it actually happens. It's just a link you click, and you're now looking at the design, or even a clickable prototype of the design. And I'm there, you can see my cursor zipping around, and you can leave a comment, or start a voice chat, and all of a sudden, I'll be damned we're collaborating. If it's a desktop app, and they have to download it, a lot of people just don't do that.

exodust 4y ago
> "you can see my cursor zipping around..." I've only used Figma a few times to review designs, but found this unsettling. Like if I was working away at my desk, and turned around to discover someone standing there watching me work. I would find that uncomfortable. In my case, I was the one that felt like I was spying on the designer working. I couldn't tell if they knew I was there. It seems like anyone with access to a particular project can watch the designer working away without being seen. Is this accurate? Is there a way to switch the multiplayer feature off?
- karaterobot 4y ago
  I don't think you can turn it off, but what you can do is work in your Drafts folder, or work on a file that isn't shared. I've done this for designs I don't think are ready to be looked at. You can always know if somebody is watching your file, because their avatar picture pops up in the top right corner. You could miss noticing that, if you're really focused on something. But if someone is zoomed in far enough to be watching what you're doing, their cursor is probably going to be visible on your screen.
  - exodust 4y ago
    Thanks. I will explore the Drafts folder and other options. I will never be comfortable with my team members watching me work without my control over that. Unless of course we're on a call with the intent to collaborate and share in real time. Otherwise I'm not onboard the idea that "multiplayer" is the default way of working. My mouse movements and decision making at any given second in time are not inherently valuable, and are a mine to share, not Adobe's to publish. It bothers me that the likes of Adobe and others try so hard to push a paradigm that results in more data points for them. More spying windows into the designer's processes, right down to mouse movement and other details. I don't understand why designers are rushing to hand over such data to what is essentially a cloud service data miner, soon to be Adobe.

enra 4y ago

First Adobe lost digital product designers a decade ago. First to Sketch, and then to Figma. Photoshop/Illustrator wasn't really made for designing digital products. Photoshop's most features are built around photos, bitmaps and pixels, and the industry moved from pixels assets to vectors or rendered UI. Adobe didn't really have tool dedicated to digital products. They bought Fireworks in 2005 but then kind of killed it. They finally woke up in 2016 and introduced Adobe XD but it was too late and it product was meh. Also many designers also hate Adobe and their creative cloud to the Adobe brand didn't help either. Sketch came along with a tool for designing digital products, like websites, mobile apps etc. It was really good, but it was a native Mac application that dealt with local .sketch files. To share the design the person would need to send them the sketch file and they would generally the same major Sketch version installed on their Mac. They also were operating an "indie" team in the Netherlands and were kind of removed how Silicon Valley teams design and build products. When Figma came along, they were bit behind of Sketch in terms performance and design features, but they had the cloud/browser first architecture where there is no local files. There is no files on anyone computers, everyone in the company has access to all the files. There generally no versions, you edit the latest file. They also listened what product design teams actually needed. For example they came to the Airbnb design team to ask about what we would need for the design system and components, and then they basically built that (I assume they also talked to other teams). They also built simple prototyping tools which then killed Invision and the cottage industry of other prototyping tools. The web sharing and basic handoff tools kind of made Zeplin and Abstract obsolete. So in the end what Figma built was a design tool that product designers and the product teams needed. It had the cloud, collaboration and the features that work in a way that make sense how things are designed and built today. It's little bit like you can run your own git server and setup, but what Github build was the workflow and the tools for teams or groups of people to build things together. Adobe still operates in the world where they sell these specialized git clients for specific types of users for but there are no workflows or really a way to do anything together.