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I was one of their first Enterprise customers way back in 2017’ish-give-or-take. The brilliance of the system he built was that it allowed for real time collab

by F7F7F7 1y ago

I was one of their first Enterprise customers way back in 2017’ish-give-or-take. The brilliance of the system he built was that it allowed for real time collaboration. Which was god send from the Sketch -> Zeplin -> Invision -> Avocode (version management) ‘stack’ that lost Enterprise design orgs were using. Which was already a large leap from what Adobe was expecting us to do with Photoshop/Illustrator (after they depreciated Fireworks). Figma made handoff much easier. Made version control dead simple. Made my life as a UX leader much much better. I remembered talking to a few now-Gigantic companies back then and we all plotted the move together It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. It’s just that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness. And for anyone who’s going to say “Sketch was Mac only that’s why it failed!” I assure you that had nothing to do with it. For the same reasons an entire generation of UX/UI designers stopped using Axure. But we would need to start talking about Invision 7 and Invision Studio if you wanted to get into the nitty gritty.

andrekandre 1y ago
> It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. It’s just that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness. yep, even though i personally prefer sketch, if i was running a company i'd most likely go with figma as well because of the collaborative capabilities; its just a huge productivity boost for collaborative teams
- OccamsMirror 1y ago
  Plus then designers, devs and stakeholders can participate on any OS they wish to use. Which, at least to me, is still important.
  - andrekandre 1y ago
    thats the biggest one probably; saw it firsthand at a large company that was using sketch but managers and others using windows or devs on linux wanted to see the designs for work and nobody was gonna change to mac for that so figma it was...
ericrosedev 1y ago
After the Adobe/Figma deal fell through a few years ago I thought they might breath new life into XD, it's a good program that integrates with your Creative Cloud libraries. No idea why they've put it on ice, especially without Figma.
- F7F7F7 1y ago
  The perception at the time was that Adobe had abandoned UX designers and wasn't willing to tailor any of their tools to them. So they (we) moved on. I was at a SXSW session with XD's product team in the early weeks/months of that products existence. The Q&A section was filled with a lot of dismissive statements and questions. XD was never going to survive.
latexr 1y ago
> And for anyone who’s going to say “Sketch was Mac only that’s why it failed!” Why would anyone say that? Sketch is still alive and (presumably) well. Apple themselves continue to officially release design files for Sketch with every OS release. They share more resources for Sketch than any other app, including Figma and Photoshop. http://developer.apple.com/design/resources/ http://developer.apple.com/design/resources/ > after they depreciated Fireworks I’ve been seeing that word used a lot in this context, so just wanted to point out (I’d appreciate if someone did the same for me) that what you mean is “deprecated” (no “i”), as depreciating is a different thing.
- diggan 1y ago
  > Why would anyone say that? Sketch is still alive and (presumably) well When people deep into the startup-woods say "Fail" what they really mean is "Didn't take over the world". Their perspective of "winning / failing" is a bit more black and white than the average person. With that said, Sketch certainly didn't become more popular because the macOS requirement even for viewing the files. I remember that there was some hacks to be able to at least view them on Linux, and other things like Zepplin (or similar) made it even easier, but it was still cumbersome. Then Figma appeared, offered more or less the same features, slightly worse performance than Sketch, but worked absolutely everywhere and was easy to open and inspect things for everyone on the team. Obviously, Figma ate a lot of the Sketch user-base, which is something I saw in multiple companies myself.
  - latexr 1y ago
    > When people deep into the startup-woods say "Fail" what they really mean is "Didn't take over the world". Their perspective of "winning / failing" is a bit more black and white than the average person. Good point (also, “deep into the startup-woods” is a great way to put it). I suspect there’s a major overlap between those people and the ones who are obsessed with products “killing” another. The same kind of people who are hyped by any new shiny pebble as if it’s the second coming of Christ and immediately eschew everything which came before. The people who are so blind to context they shouted “zOMG Google is dead because of ChatGPT” because they were incapable of thinking for two seconds that Google has a ton of cash to survive in the long run, were already leading research in the field, and (of course) wouldn’t just fold their arms and stay still. In short, people not worth listening to.
ichik 1y ago
> It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. Writing this from the perspective of someone who used to spend all day every day in Photoshop/Sketch/Figma for decades. This markedly contradicts my recollection of the state of Sketch at the time Figma was in its first public beta. Sketch's performance was abhorrent and it was constantly crashing while working with libraries. I was very skeptical about web-technology based tool in terms of performance, but Figma blew me away. It was FAST.
- rudi-c 1y ago
  There's definitely others that shared your perspective. A commonly cited reason of early Figma adopters was that they felt it was faster than Sketch. Of course, the reality was that performance is a super nuanced thing. It's always measured in relation to specific things, but ultimately summarized via a "feeling". Aspects of performance include: - Loading a (blank/medium/large) file from (scratch/cache/etc) - Performance when editing (what?), panning, zooming (small or large doc?) - Performance with a large number of simple objects, or complex objects (components? variables? nested components? drop shadows/background blurs?) I haven't personally done some performance comparisons between the two apps since ~2018 but at the time there were definitely things where Figma was noticeably faster than sketch, a lot of things that were comparable, some things that were slower. My own very biased feeling was that Figma was faster more often than not but it's always up to the individual use case, how their file is setup, what they are doing within that file, and how they mentally weigh those different scenarios. I definitely didn't feel like being on the web was a limiting factor. In some theoretical state, with infinite resources to optimize everything, native could be faster since you have access to lower-level APIs. In practice, that's the same argument as "it could be faster in hand-written assembly". Almost never did we get to the point where we'd use those abilities even if we had them, due to their cost on development and impact on the correctness/maintainability of the code.

by F7F7F7 1y ago

andrekandre 1y ago

> It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. It’s just that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness. yep, even though i personally prefer sketch, if i was running a company i'd most likely go with figma as well because of the collaborative capabilities; its just a huge productivity boost for collaborative teams

OccamsMirror 1y ago
Plus then designers, devs and stakeholders can participate on any OS they wish to use. Which, at least to me, is still important.
- andrekandre 1y ago
  thats the biggest one probably; saw it firsthand at a large company that was using sketch but managers and others using windows or devs on linux wanted to see the designs for work and nobody was gonna change to mac for that so figma it was...

ericrosedev 1y ago

After the Adobe/Figma deal fell through a few years ago I thought they might breath new life into XD, it's a good program that integrates with your Creative Cloud libraries. No idea why they've put it on ice, especially without Figma.

F7F7F7 1y ago
The perception at the time was that Adobe had abandoned UX designers and wasn't willing to tailor any of their tools to them. So they (we) moved on. I was at a SXSW session with XD's product team in the early weeks/months of that products existence. The Q&A section was filled with a lot of dismissive statements and questions. XD was never going to survive.

latexr 1y ago

> And for anyone who’s going to say “Sketch was Mac only that’s why it failed!” Why would anyone say that? Sketch is still alive and (presumably) well. Apple themselves continue to officially release design files for Sketch with every OS release. They share more resources for Sketch than any other app, including Figma and Photoshop. http://developer.apple.com/design/resources/ http://developer.apple.com/design/resources/ > after they depreciated Fireworks I’ve been seeing that word used a lot in this context, so just wanted to point out (I’d appreciate if someone did the same for me) that what you mean is “deprecated” (no “i”), as depreciating is a different thing.

diggan 1y ago
> Why would anyone say that? Sketch is still alive and (presumably) well When people deep into the startup-woods say "Fail" what they really mean is "Didn't take over the world". Their perspective of "winning / failing" is a bit more black and white than the average person. With that said, Sketch certainly didn't become more popular because the macOS requirement even for viewing the files. I remember that there was some hacks to be able to at least view them on Linux, and other things like Zepplin (or similar) made it even easier, but it was still cumbersome. Then Figma appeared, offered more or less the same features, slightly worse performance than Sketch, but worked absolutely everywhere and was easy to open and inspect things for everyone on the team. Obviously, Figma ate a lot of the Sketch user-base, which is something I saw in multiple companies myself.
- latexr 1y ago
  > When people deep into the startup-woods say "Fail" what they really mean is "Didn't take over the world". Their perspective of "winning / failing" is a bit more black and white than the average person. Good point (also, “deep into the startup-woods” is a great way to put it). I suspect there’s a major overlap between those people and the ones who are obsessed with products “killing” another. The same kind of people who are hyped by any new shiny pebble as if it’s the second coming of Christ and immediately eschew everything which came before. The people who are so blind to context they shouted “zOMG Google is dead because of ChatGPT” because they were incapable of thinking for two seconds that Google has a ton of cash to survive in the long run, were already leading research in the field, and (of course) wouldn’t just fold their arms and stay still. In short, people not worth listening to.

ichik 1y ago

> It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. Writing this from the perspective of someone who used to spend all day every day in Photoshop/Sketch/Figma for decades. This markedly contradicts my recollection of the state of Sketch at the time Figma was in its first public beta. Sketch's performance was abhorrent and it was constantly crashing while working with libraries. I was very skeptical about web-technology based tool in terms of performance, but Figma blew me away. It was FAST.

rudi-c 1y ago
There's definitely others that shared your perspective. A commonly cited reason of early Figma adopters was that they felt it was faster than Sketch. Of course, the reality was that performance is a super nuanced thing. It's always measured in relation to specific things, but ultimately summarized via a "feeling". Aspects of performance include: - Loading a (blank/medium/large) file from (scratch/cache/etc) - Performance when editing (what?), panning, zooming (small or large doc?) - Performance with a large number of simple objects, or complex objects (components? variables? nested components? drop shadows/background blurs?) I haven't personally done some performance comparisons between the two apps since ~2018 but at the time there were definitely things where Figma was noticeably faster than sketch, a lot of things that were comparable, some things that were slower. My own very biased feeling was that Figma was faster more often than not but it's always up to the individual use case, how their file is setup, what they are doing within that file, and how they mentally weigh those different scenarios. I definitely didn't feel like being on the web was a limiting factor. In some theoretical state, with infinite resources to optimize everything, native could be faster since you have access to lower-level APIs. In practice, that's the same argument as "it could be faster in hand-written assembly". Almost never did we get to the point where we'd use those abilities even if we had them, due to their cost on development and impact on the correctness/maintainability of the code.