Apple's Shifting Differentiation

I thought this statement from the article had more than a hint of truth to it: "Figma in Electron may destroy your battery, but that destruction will take twice as long, if not more, with an A-series chip inside!"

This will allow Sketch to kick Figma's ass as soon as they solve their online multi-user editing

UI designer here, migrated from Sketch (used for about 5 years) to Figma. I'm happy to celebrate Sketch as a great Mac app, and I still keep it in the dock for short tasks, but I'm not looking back. Figma won me over.

And it's not just Figma's collaborative features. Figma made fundamentally better decisions about design tool feature set. Better vector editor. Better concept of "symbol" as a component. Much better approach to auto-layout. Much better approach to shared colors / text styles.

At every step, Figma is just a better designed design tool. And a large part of why it's taking the design world by storm is exactly that. Most design work is done alone, not collaboratively dragging elements on the screen. Figma is just a great tool. Sketch is trying to catch up, but they would need to modify a LOT of their past decisions to get to the spot Figma is at.

I am reading all this Figma talk in utter disbelief. Actually in my view Sketch never had a chance to replace Illustrator or Affinity Designer. Figma? For collaboration if use case is demanding it may be. But suddenly UI design field is filled with decorators doing boxes with drop shadow but having "Designer"opinions. May be I am in mostly silent minority of professionals that don't search and prize tools over essential skills. As a designer your work must be detached of workflow sentiments. Tools are tools. Nothing more. I can make a great UI with Inkscape any day I want. I can implement and test it in pure HTML/CSS prototype. So what? On Apple and cloud computing in general. I like owning things, call me old-fashioned, boomer, or whatever. When I own a piece of software, I can use it without someone logging my mouse and keyboard, without fear of losing internet connection. Is this a small thing to behold?

That's quite a rant, so I'll pick out probably the core message:

    As a designer your work must be detached of workflow sentiments. Tools are tools. Nothing more. I can make a great UI with Inkscape any day I want.

As software development is changing, UI design tools are changing. Inkscape has no concept of Symbols or Auto-layout. Sure, you CAN establish a design system in Inkscape, but it will be mostly copy-paste and lots of resizing.

Figma takes this a step further. Design components can be connected to JS components using Storybooks. Localization can be automatically applied to designs, and elements will automatically adjust because of a powerful, flexbox-like auto-layout.

Sure, you CAN make the same design using Inkscape. But Figma enables previously impossible workflows and makes the end result -- user experience with product -- better.

Please, don't be so quick on the trigger.:) The core message is: Tools are tools. Nothing more. Actually I have been around enough to design and implement pixel perfect designs using Macromedia Fireworks - the originator of the idea of symbols. Figma enables collaborative implementation and in this use case I will consider using it. But the prevalent idea in current moment is that Figma is universal cure of a big problem, a tool to end all tools. Which is not. The biggest problem for me is the lack of originality and deep visual identity in UI design in general. We have powerful computers that can play 4k video games but UI design is boring boxes and most important thing for designers is to collaborate online.