Figma Platform

Figma use the word &quot;open&quot; to describe some restrictive APIs in their wall garden, which is disingenuous coming from programmers who know what &quot;open&quot; really means.<p>Usually collaboration is done using a Git-like external version control tool or just file syncing with Dropbox. Even Adobe Photoshop stores your data in files that you can share as you like. Figma&#x27;s collaborative approach is certainly good UX, but on the whole a net-negative for the world if it catches on.<p>If your code is stored exclusively on GitHub and can only be edited through the UI then you are at GitHub&#x27;s continued mercy to have access to your own data. You lose it when your subscription expires or when GitHub thinks they no longer like you. This is the general trend of software turning into services and they are actually locking you in with your own data. But it is also a challenge to provide seamless realtime collaboration on the same document if sits in files rather than on the web. The best of both worlds would be a software that has both the convenience and openness of individual files and has seamless collaboration.

This is really amazing for the design tooling ecosystem. Sketch opened their file format, but Figma&#x27;s APIs are actually a pleasure to work with. It was super easy for us to add a Figma importing to our design-to-React platform (Pagedraw), so you can now your draw your React UIs with Figma and ship them right to production.<p>disclaimer: I&#x27;m with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pagedraw.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pagedraw.io&#x2F;</a>, one of the integrations mentioned in the post

A few years back when the Mac App Store launched, I put an app up there and got a tweet from one of the future founders of Figma. I think he was in early college, or even high school. We corresponded a bit and I followed him on Twitter. Pretty interesting to see how much cool stuff he has done since then.

Figma’s really gunning at a Slack with this move, as Sketch’s plugin ecosystem is a huge reason as to why it’s successful. (Edit: this doesn’t bring extension support, but is definitely a step towards that goal)<p>For any other designers on HN, have you switched to Figma to Sketch, and if so, why?

Product homepage: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;</a>

I wish submissions announcing something new like this included something in the title to just say what it is.