Adobe Gave Up (On Developers)

Adobe's acquisition of Figma was controversial, but I suspect the end of XD will be even moreso. It's clear that Figma has won, even Sketch is barely used nowadays. What does this mean for devs and designers? Let's talk about it

(This probably should have been a 2nd channel video but I said "developers" so many times I decided it goes here)

SOURCES

S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[tanja_the_fox]

Always remember kids, pirating Adobe products is morally correct

[timkreutzkamp]

Good for Figma! Everything that Adobe touches goes to shit. Every new tool that Adobe aquires gets dropped after around 2 Years to the point that it makes no sense to invest time in learning the software. Premiere is a shitshow as you said, where every update only brakes features and brings no improvement to the point, where you are afraid of installing an update because it can break your whole projekt. Aftereffects is the same. It had a few nice features in the last updates but they are 10 years to late. We wanted multiframe rendering and an usable 3D space 10 years ago. Now it is too late. Why should i pay 800€ a year when i can have something better like Affinity and Davnici for 500€ onetime payment. I am sick of Adobe because they dont care about their users anymore...

[msitch]

I studied CS and Fine Art in school. I grew up loving the creative suite -- I even TA-ed a digital art course that basically just taught it. After school I worked as a dev for a startup that was acquired by Adobe 8mos later.

It became very clear then that Adobe only cared about the Marketing suite and gave absolutely zero fucks about the gems of creative tools they had which are used by artists and designers everyday. They simply don't make the company money. It was really heartbreaking.

[matheuslasserre]

I was loving to use Figma to develop(My designer build the UI with it), and it stills good enough. But yesterday(Feb 1), they launched the "Dev Mode" which provided a 10-20% boost productivity when matching the UI to code, which would be just cool, a productivity bonus, right? No. They removed almost all the features of the standard mode that was comparable to the Dev Mode, and put everything behind the PayWall to use the Dev Mode. And i, as a Developer, as far as i know, CAN'T buy the membership to use the Dev interface if i just receive the Designs. You need to pay a team and put the designer in a team.

I would never complain about it if it wasn't for the strip of features they've done on the standard mode. It still works ok, but that was a huge L for Figma, in my opinion. At least for the Freelance market, but i don't see how this would benefit any other market.

[dogoku]

Adobe actually had the precursor to all of these tools, namely Fireworks, which was a tool developed by Macromedia that specialized in web designs. It was vector based but could also handle raster images, had responsive design support, symbols with states (hover, focus, etc), integrated with Photoshop and Illustrator. and this was before Sketch even came around (arguably the first of these modern tools). But Adobe silently killed off just like everything from Macromedia. Then years later they decide to build basically the same thing and call it Adobe XD...

[madsouris]

Hopefully Affinity or Serif will have their own version of UI UX tools, they make good software

[Grepehu]

That just shows how Adobe doesn't give a F about their products, it's about what the investors buzzwords of the moment are, which would inevitably enshitify Figma in the process if they had acquired it.

I still hope we can boost some of the competitors one day, specially the open source ones, being able to self-host your tools and create an internal environment is quite valuable to have in your team.

[Nassifeh]

I am no fan of Adobe, but I am super worried by the continuing way that it appears to be completely untenable to be the second-best product in a software market. Like, is this actually survivable for the rest of us as an industry, if we continue to crown "winners" in any given product instead of having a number of viable alternatives that meet different needs? I'd wager a lot of us actually work for companies where our jobs won't exist if that keeps up for an extended period. I'm not surprised by Adobe doing this, but I feel like even those of us who like Figma should find that usage chart alarming.

[warpigroadkill]

Dominos workers are called "Dominoids" that's worst than Figmates, I guess. Figmates sounds like a Figma dating site.

[karvarousk]

As UX designer, I find it more productive to create static images describing flows and use them in documentation. This means, that I don’t desire Figma’s latest more advanced prototyping tools. Figjam is cool though. The faster we get to coding the better.

[daromacs]

This dev mode and the way they are setting the payments is really really bad

[DanDecryptedXD]

Do you think that Adobe threw XD in the bin so that they could prove they "aren't direct competition" to figma anymore because they won't have a competing product? If they don't have a web UI design product that would mean that the courts couldn't use the excuse that they are a direct competitor and could acquire figma for the same offer or less?

[polygons]

Well, I made most of my design and web stuff back in the days when all was built in Photoshop (and plain CSS + HTML) and/or Illustrator, pixel perfect. Not flexible for fast workflows by any means, but very accurate. Back when graphic and artistic skills would ensure a job...

[m-ok-]

The tech stack gave up on developers by forcing them to learn something new before they got comfortable with the last new and greatest framework.

[karmatraining]

Imagine how this must make the Adobe XD developers feel

[davidkonevky]

I love adobe, but only when I go pirate mode. There's no way i'm ever paying them 😂

[pawelblaszczyk__]

I still respect the Adobe for react-aria/react-spectrum. Of course it’s made by some brilliant folks, where all props should go, but also the company could decide against open sourcing it etc.

[MikkelrumSkovgaardPetersen]

I find a lot of value in hand drawn sketches and almost production ready code mock-ups. Anything in between just seems like a hassle. Maybe that's because we have a decent library of react components that we can use like Legos, much like the components in figma. Figma just seems like an unnecessary extra step though

[jdubz]

I think that designers being separated from the code logic in general is both an inefficiency and perspective improvement. It's always the case that a designer creates something that's not necessarily the best thing for the user because of a base lack of understanding of the underlying platform. Meanwhile, that blindness allows them to push for things that a developer would avoid otherwise which can lead to interesting creative directions. That said, my best experiences as a dev are usually when a designer starts from a position of understanding what is possible and discussing innovations after the initial product is out and live. Keeps budgets and development sane.

[nodidog]

Hearing that they call their staff 'figmates' makes me want to not use Figma (after i've stopped puking)