Just paying Figma because nothing else works

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/just-paying-figma-15-dollars

by ingve • 3 years ago

280 234 3 years ago

fasterthanli.me

billfruit3• 3 years ago

Article ignoring the elephants in the room: Inkscape and Illustrator.

ska• 3 years ago

Those really don't solve the same problem.

Personally, I've found a lot of stuff that could be a figma or drawio (or inscape etc., yes) are more effective being a PUML or DOT or MetaPost file (or whatever format floats your boat) - not because it's easier to make (it isn't) but because it's much easier to change coherently and they change a lot. You can version control it better also.

If you want a prettier final form for some sort of final frozen version, redraw it in whatever tool you like.

paradox460• 3 years ago

I find mermaid is simple enough non tech people can use it, and has fairly broad support. PUML can obviously do more, but mermaid is there, which helps out tremendously

billfruit3• 3 years ago

Why not SVG, which is what Inkscape is built around?

Solvency• 3 years ago

Maybe in terms of generic vectors. Neither of those are even remotely comparable to Figma's full feature set.

codedokode2• 3 years ago

Could you give several examples of what is missing in Inkscape, but is implemented well in Figma? I only used Inkscape so I don't know much about Figma.

jwells899• 3 years ago

My experience with Inkscape is limited but last I used Illustrator, it felt very print-oriented and awkward at best for the use case of creating screen-destined vector graphics. That's actually what pushed me into starting to use Sketch for those purposes about a decade ago.

billfruit3• 3 years ago

I think Inkscape isn't that print oriented, the tools available in it work very well for both print and digital applications.

Even Inkscape's native format is SVG which is primarily a screen/digital format.

happytoexplain2• 3 years ago

They are simply not interface design or diagramming tools (I have a good amount of experience with both).

DHPersonal• 3 years ago

There's Affinity Designer, too. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/

WhyNotHugo• 3 years ago

Perhaps open source would be better if we had less people like this willing to fund proprietary development while writing hate pieces towards open source.

seanhunter• 3 years ago

Open source is amazing. It's more than good enough to stand people writing snarky hot takes to increase their blog viewership.

It just turns out that the economics of open source aren't necessarily a good fit for every use case. It's just not going to win everywhere for every user.

I'll give you an example: computer algebra and graphing.

Open source we have maxima (and wxmaxima). It is.... well weird but highly functional. It crashes from time to time but when it's not crashing you can do a lot with it. Every plot has thousands of options and you sort of need to specify most of them to get anything that looks half-decent. For some reason I don't fully understand you have to specify gnuplot options as well as maxima options sometimes but it's nice that it supports both of them. It's an absolute labour of love by the team who develop it.

Paid for there is Mathematica. If you're a student it's like 75 bucks a year but if you're trying to use it in industry it's nearly 4 grand. Per user per year. It can do basically the same sort of thing as maxima but the graphs look amazing out of the box, the options aren't weird, there is support etc etc.

Now here's the thing: Maxima is much better than Mathematica at certain things. And it's free. But it's really weird and some simple things are hard (like just graphing 2 2-d plots on the same axis) until you get the hang of it. And it's sort of lispy which I like but is weird for many people.

lacrosse_tannin• 3 years ago

the author contributes to all kinds of opensource

danenania• 3 years ago

Open source is great, but why should anyone expect engineers to create serious alternatives to products with millions in revenue for them for free?

I'm probably kicking the hornets' nest here, but I see this as a naive perspective that mainly benefits big tech and VC-funded projects that can afford to fund free stuff as loss leaders or funnels into their proprietary offerings.

You should want to pay for the important tools you use. That's how you know that that they're sustainable, that fixes and improvements will be prioritized, and that there's no ulterior motive for the owner of the project. It also creates a healthy ecosystem where indie devs and startups can get traction and make money when they build useful stuff. A race to the bottom only benefits the established players.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

what works even better is a quick sketch for your website/diagram uploaded to Chat GPT4-V, a description of what it is and a request output it in the code you want that makes it executable

but that's $20/month so maybe this person hates that

Our_Benefactors2• 3 years ago

Figma serves an entirely different purpose than generating spaghetti code.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

such as? all the teams I’ve been on have been using these tools to ultimately get them to be something more than pictures, what I described seems to skip that process and those personnel entirely

apsurd• 3 years ago

I enjoyed the writing style. It's too long for me to read fully - I'm supposed to be working - the length and meandering adds to the charm perhaps. The person is clearly expressing themself.

hoten• 3 years ago

I read the whole thing. I don't know what I was meant to take away from it. Just came off as a rant?

fasterthanlime5• 3 years ago

I mean it's right there in the tags.

HL33tibCe73• 3 years ago

I can’t stand the smug and arrogant “I know better than everyone” writing style. The content’s generally alright though, at least on a technical level

happytoexplain2• 3 years ago

I think we're living in a time where the tendency to see "smug" in writing/speaking/personalities is unusually high. There's a deep hatred for smugness that is maybe justified and maybe not, but regardless it has been wildly overapplied during the past 10 years.

Specifically I think the line between writing in a colloquial, sarcastic, dry, opinionated, florid, or satirical style; and being arrogant; is where we are overinterpreting things as the latter.

We seem to be sensitive to the idea that somebody might think they are "better than us". It seems often like an insecurity?

syndicatedjelly• 3 years ago

I can't stand the wishy-washy "Oh MAYBE I think this is how things work, but what do I know :)"

Take responsibility for your opinions, don't make your reader sift through vague intentions.

baronblackmore• 3 years ago

Figma is the one product I will not stop preaching about, you literally have to stop me before I start singing it's praises. For me it's made redundant illustrator, acrobat, indesign, PowerPoint and miro. I'm almost free from adobe jail.

mplewis9z• 3 years ago

…you do know they’re in the process (and quite far along) of being acquired by Adobe, right?

qzw2• 3 years ago

I thought GP’s comment was trying to set up the Godfather 3 quote:

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” — Michael Corleone

NicoJuicy• 3 years ago

/s?

You do know that Adobe acquired Figma?

abhinavk• 3 years ago

So who's gonna tell him?

tpmx2• 3 years ago

I really want Apple to repurpose a subset of the Keynote codebase into an awesome drawing program. They could name it MacDraw.

But, no, instead they'll do something involving 3d emojis or something similarly useful.

FigurativeVoid• 3 years ago

What about freeform? I've never used it, but it seems fine.

tpmx2• 3 years ago

It's extremely meh. It's iOS-ified. There are no files, just some proprietary database of your drawings. You can only export to PDF. You can't import vectors. There are no dimensions inspectors where you can enter numbers, because that feels weird in iOS.

You will draw your thing by hand and you will be happy.

quibono• 3 years ago

let me emphasize this: absolutely nobody should be running anything in production using a docker-compose file.

This might be a stupid question: what is wrong about deploying with Compose? What are the "proper" ways of doing things?

doctoboggan• 3 years ago

Nothing is wrong with deploying with docker-compose. Many people will push you toward k8s but if compose does the job there is absolutely no reason to introduce the complexity of k8s. Compose will get you far. (farther than many people think).

spdustin• 3 years ago

FTA:

""" What you're meant to do is, of course, run it on Kubernetes, which is largely the same (it's containers all the way down) except it's configured differently, you can now think about scaling out (on several nodes), you have actual health/liveness checks and policies for rolling out new versions, restarting, etc.

It's k8s! We all love to hate it, but at least the industry has sorta standardized around it, so that makes commiserating easier.

And because penpot is made up of three services (backend, exporter, frontend — not counting postgres and redis), although you could technically deploy all three of them separately, the idiomatic and era-appropriate thing to do at the time of this writing is to use a helm chart, which lets you deploy several resources at once. """

gaganyaan• 3 years ago

It's fine if you've got a low-volume service or one where downtime isn't a huge deal. If you ever find yourself needing e.g. autoscaling due to load or you start measuring how many 9's of uptime you get, then you'd want to look elsewhere.

redox99• 3 years ago

There's nothing wrong. What's actually wrong is always using k8s even when it's overkill.

evilduck• 3 years ago

Compose is fine for what it is, it’s served my personal VPS for years perfectly and I’ve hosted internal tools for teams with it for stuff that would never need to scale beyond that instance and never needed to be public. Personal projects and even small companies can likely get away with it just fine.

But if you’re dealing with any larger organization they probably don’t want to deal with you spinning up a random unprovisioned server running docker and compose services and will require stuff like Ansible scripts or similar to manage it. Once you start trying to manage docker-compose with extra tooling you might as well bite the bullet and learn k8s and get more out of your time and learning investment.

andrewstuart2• 3 years ago

There are plenty of people who are REALLY committed to not spending money on software.

Then there are people who want to live their best life.

internetter• 3 years ago

As someone who has dumped hundreds of dollars for software in the apple ecosystem (after switching from linux), there is a time and a place for both.

nightfly2• 3 years ago

Part of my "best life" isn't being nickel and dimed into poverty by everything modern wanting it's "only a cup of coffee" $5 drop of blood every month

andrewstuart2• 3 years ago

It's just about balance.

If there is something I need that provides value then my wallet instantly comes out.

I more than happily pay for my JetBrains IDE - it's a tool I use full time.

Same for ChatGPT - I'd throw my money at them. I'd pay 5 times as much.

I was paying for an anti spam system but I'm not convinced it was doing a great job.

rice7th9• 3 years ago

I am wondering why he didn't at least try Inkscape. Since 1.0 it has gotten SO much better. It even has much better export quality compared to figma (from much more accurate gradients to strokes), and it has one of the best snapping systems ever created. He should seriously check it out!

nightfly2• 3 years ago

I love Inkscape on Linux, and abuse it for desktop publishing and basic CAD work, but on Windows and Mac (especially Mac) it just doesn't seem to work as well and I don't understand why. I almost feel bad suggesting it to people because of this

clumsysmurf• 3 years ago

I think its because GTK, but I'm not certain. I used Inkscape quite a bit but shifted to Affinity Designer.

rice7th9• 3 years ago

Yeah but luckily they're switching to GTK4 AND an OpenGL renderer, meaning that it will be much snappier on both MacOS and Windows.

itronitron• 3 years ago

Inkscape on Windows has been great for me, but I haven't compared it to Inkscape on Linux :)

yuumei• 3 years ago

Inkscape is one of the best programs out there. I use it for everything now. Did you know it can do mesh gradients too now

rice7th9• 3 years ago

Yes I know, but mesh gradients are a part of Inkscape since at least 0.92, which is when I started using it, aka 2019.

Gualdrapo• 3 years ago

I needed to make diagram,s so I compared a few options and quickly settled on "draw.io"

So this not rules out that he didn't at some point. But still to my graphic designer eyes choosing either Inkscape (and even more, Figma) for doing simple diagrams is really, really weird.

* Disclaimer: I'm a heavy Inkscape user, it's been one of my main tools for all of uni and my professional work since 2006 - yes, it has some unpolished details here and there, but still it's great and (for me) miles better than any paid non-free tool

rice7th9• 3 years ago

Yes, but what I am trying to say is that figma is not a diagramming tool. It wasn't built to create diagrams. Inkscape wasn't either, yet Inkscape still has some support for diagram creation, even if it is quite poor.

indymike• 3 years ago

Inkscape is not a diagram editor, but can be used to create diagrams.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 3 years ago

Inkscape and diagramming tools are trying to solve very distinct solutions.

Inkscape is a general purpose vector graphics program, designed to let you do anything.

Diagramming tools are there to provide you with a fast way to draw a diagram, which most importantly often contains connecting boxes with arrows that will auto-route and re-route when you move the boxes. I'm not aware of Inkscape supporting that, and I suspect that even if it somehow does, it'll require many more clicks.

Draw.io is good enough for a one-off usecase, but if you're creating a couple diagrams and consider your time to have monetary value, the better usability of Figma means it'll pay for itself really quickly.

rice7th9• 3 years ago

Yes but figma wasn't made for diagrams either. Both are vector design tools, not diagramming tools, that's why I am asking: if figma was okay then why not Inkscape?

fasterthanlime5• 3 years ago

Right, I forgot to mention that — I bought Affinity Designer 2, and I'm really with it, but diagramming in it is an absolute chore. Two completely separate usecases for me.

kps• 3 years ago

it has one of the best snapping systems ever created

Is this documented somewhere? inkscape.org points to inkscape-manuals.readthedocs.io which doesn't cover it at all. I can't even get it to snap to an anchor if the grid is showing, and I can't get it to snap to the grid if the view isn't zoomed close enough.

Glyptodon• 3 years ago

It has all kinds of snapping settings that tend to have inscrutable icons, but turn out to be very useful, especially if you can remember shortcuts.

rice7th9• 3 years ago

Yet Inkscape's snapping system changes pased on where your cursor is, making fine tuned alignments much better than ANY other software. Yes, I know it is a complex system that's not very well documented, but my point still stands.

IshKebab• 3 years ago

Inkscape is terrible for making diagrams. It's more for art and icons and so on.

one of the best snapping systems ever created

Not the best though. That honour goes to IPE.

https://ipe.otfried.org/

IPE is also a pretty good diagram editor, though it is quite heavily tied to LaTeX and more oriented towards maths / geometry diagrams than technical block diagrams. Draw.io is best for the latter, except for the stupid limitation that you can't really export text objects to real SVG as mentioned in the article. It just embeds HTML objects in the SVG which means they only work in browsers.

Isthatablackgsd• 3 years ago

I believe yEd can do this. Maybe try out yEd?

rice7th9• 3 years ago

I know Inkscape is terrible for making diagrams, but what I am trying to say is that figma is even worse. Inkscape has at least some tools to help you create some diagrams, but figma is just for UI/UX design, not diagrams.

Not the best though. That honour goes to IPE.

Never heard of IPE, I am going to check it out, thanks.

eterm• 3 years ago

A reasonable article outlining why sometimes it's worth paying for software and going into detail about what exactly is wrong with the free alternatives.

But it's a long article, so I guess I should have just reacted to the headline instead rather than reading the article.

HL33tibCe73• 3 years ago

drawio supports saving diagrams as editable SVGs

imslavko2• 3 years ago

Does it support exporting to SVGs without requiring the used fonts installed on the viewer's system? That seems to be the issue the author is trying to address.

HL33tibCe73• 3 years ago

Can the author not simply include the necessary fonts on his site?

steveruizok• 3 years ago

Embedding fonts isn't really great for SVG exports; either you link to the fonts, in which case the SVGs only load correctly when the user has the font locally or is online, and the CDN is still running; or else you embed them as base 64, which makes the image very large.

We do the base 64 route for tldraw, which is sort of the best of all bad options. I'd like to someday add more export options so that a creator could host the fonts themselves on the same site where the SVG is shown.

jwells899• 3 years ago

This blog post indirectly touches on one of my most frequent (if potentially unfair) gripes with FOSS projects, which is how few of them have a culture of polish and user-friendliness.

So many of these projects seem to try to do as many things as possible somewhat passably instead of doing a handful of things really really well, and this is often not only what pushes me to use proprietary products instead but also disinclines contribution, whether that be by way of code or donations. If I try to contribute code, project misalignment with personal values is going to make getting PRs/patches approved a constant battle, and on the cash side of things it's hard to justify spending on a project I may never find usable.

This means that the number of FOSS projects I contribute to is much smaller than I'd prefer it to be.

qzw2• 3 years ago

Writing new features is fun. Polishing is boring and thankless, aka work. Most people will do fun things for free but want to be paid for work. Probably not going to change anytime soon.

jjoonathan2• 3 years ago

Writing is fun, polishing is boring but ok, merge politics is like burning in the pits of hell. Same result.

jwells899• 3 years ago

And that's totally fair, but at the same time something of a catch-22. The most well-funded FOSS projects (and thus, those one is most likely to be paid to work on) are generally those that are more polished. What this means to me is that projects need to have a very focused featureset and polish culture from the very beginning to kickstart the virtuous cycle.

dylan6044• 3 years ago

it's also a lot to do with the types of people that do polishing/artistic work are very different people from those that do the programming of the features.

expecting an artist to be a good programmer or a programmer to be a good artist is just unrealistic. not a lot of artist attracted to FOSS/github/projects to go looking for things to do. probably a much better result from FOSS maintainers to jump onto Fivr and look for someone to do polish

evilotto• 3 years ago

jwz dubbed this "CADT programming"

csnover• 3 years ago

There is a secondary issue: Even on projects where someone is interested in doing polish work, since it usually takes longer to polish than to write a new feature, those who only care about writing features cause the backlog of things that need polish to grow infinitely.

I don’t really know of a good strategy for dealing with this in FOSS. If a feature contributor doesn’t care about polish, and you say to them ‘please fix the UX’, they can just either ignore the feedback (‘perfect is the enemy of good! move fast and break things!’), or if they don’t have direct commit access, create a fork that they can then advertise as having lots of cool new features.

I would love to know some strategies that work to strike a balance between not demanding perfection and not allowing garbage to be mainlined.

nazka• 3 years ago

I actually love polishing but not writing tests unless it’s with cypress.

opportune4• 3 years ago

I don’t mean to be snarky but you really just get what you pay for. A lot of FOSS is produced by people for fun, to solve a specific problem they have, or to learn/play around with some technical concept. Unsurprisingly, people don’t want to do the unfun things like deliver a UX that’s intuitive even for those who don’t work in the thing, or handle support, or play TL/EM/PM with randoms on GitHub.

Gigachad3• 3 years ago

I feel like my optimism for FOSS software has slowly degraded to nothing. GIMP will literally never replace Photoshop and the gap between them is only growing. How can a product that's raking in millions of dollars a year ever be replaced by a few people working on it in their free time?

When software was simple and if companies were just sitting still without continuing development, maybe. But most companies seem to be full steam ahead pumping everything in to research and development.

ozim• 3 years ago

Don't just go into blaming culture.

Everyone should accept that is just super expensive to do good software. Money help, but it is also expensive in terms of focus and time. Having team of developers/business analysts/QA focused on one project is loads of money.

Even for small team like 5 devs, 1 QA, 1BA - let's say every team member gets roughly $6k a month that is like $42000 a month. Now question is how many features/fixes can you do with that team? Well form experience you get maybe 8 big features, where big feature is like 2 weeks of work for a developer back and forth from QA and getting clarifications from BA, you have 5 devs but in reality there will be no 100% alignment and you still have bug fixes, busy work etc.

So $42000 divided by 8 gives that any feature costs around $5250 to build initially and still might be having bugs and need for adjustments. But you have at any point in time at least 3 people looking at the feature and making it work/finished.

Now we can talk about culture where companies throw $5k at a feature on a whim, burn everyone's time with useless meetings on VC fueled life support compared to FOSS where budget for a feature is more like $1k of whatever spare time some dude somewhere has and he is "making the feature up, coding it and testing" in most projects on his own.

a1o3• 3 years ago

making the feature up

This is super hard, often someone will write a mindless issue with a feature request without thinking about it profoundly.

Than the dev has to sift through the text to understand what is the underlying problem the user is facing, if the proposed solution is actually a good solution to that problem (it often isn't), what is a solution considering long term maintenability, if the feature has synergy with future features or if it solves or is close to solve other already existing issue so the solution scope should be adjusted. The design stage is huge and it's hard to do alone and also hard when other contributors only raise edge cases to try to break a proposed design without validating if the problem the developer extracted is adequate. The scoping and design is often very time consuming and hard to get it right. Usually you end up designing to the scope of available time to solve the issue at hand - time being a rainy Sunday afternoon, or around three and half hours.

ajb3• 3 years ago

The question there is why you're operating using teams of 5 devs. The most productive environments I've worked at were ones where single devs had ownership over a chunk large enough not to require that much interaction (IE an amount of interaction that you would contemplate between teams, not between devs on a team)

The issue with that is that you have to eat a big handover cost when people leave. But these environments had great retention and long contractual notice periods, so it wasn't a huge issue.

IMO the "two pizza team" isn't as productive as people think.

poisonborz• 3 years ago

The way FOSS works engraves feature abundance - every contributor has some feature wish that they will add - most of them jumps on the project for that very feature. Both contributors and target audience values features and configurability, and "unpolished" parts (mostly meaning you need to click 2 submenus more, you need some config to be set or script it yourself) are not a problem. This is the very antithesis of a for-profit company being laser focused on some customer group and wanting to be cost efficient with resources.

jwells899• 3 years ago

Lack of polish also extends to some of the things like the TFA mentions, like incomplete SVG export functionality.

Either way, I don't believe that polish and FOSS feature abundance necessarily have to be at odds; it just means that the project in question needs to have a process for developing new features to production-readiness. This can take form in any number of ways, for example using feature flags to keep things that aren't yet fully baked enabled only in beta/alpha builds — people happy with a less polished experience can use betas until the feature they need is ready for primetime while the greater userbase gets a better user experience.

opportune4• 3 years ago

Kind of agree, kind of don’t. A lot of companies also bolt on as many features and integrations to their products as they need, to close sales or just because they think it will help expand their potential customer base. A lot of FOSS is maintained by people who don’t want to spend their free time shepherding some code they wrote turning into everything-software either.

There is a particular failure mode in FOSS though - normally in businesses, prioritizing new features is done on the basis of how it will ultimately affect revenue (or reduce costs, simplify things, reduce maintenance burden - still money at the end of the day). For those FOSS projects that are open to new features from randoms, those individuals are mostly adding features they individually want, and the amount of investment in those features is limited mostly by their level of personal interest. So you end up with a set of features that is more stochastically chosen, and some unimportant or minor features may have a huge amount of complexity/configurability/feature-specific code because one person needed it.

fhub2• 3 years ago

Don't underestimate how much headcount is pouring over an array of analytics tools and split testing tools to optimize a commercial product compared to FOSS. For every dark pattern change that is made in a commercial product, perhaps 100 actual improvements/polish changes are made to workflows.

TeMPOraL• 3 years ago

Though imagine how much more features and improvements that commercial product would have, if most or all of that headcount pouring over analytics were retasked to design, development, and actually talking to the users (or $deity forbid, shadowing some users to see how they use the software).

Other than being more careful due to software being sold on physical media, I wonder if that wasn't the lost secret source of software in pre-webapp times.

micromacrofoot2• 3 years ago

Polishing is expensive, and while you're doing it you're falling further behind on feature parity.

The fact is that OSS simply can not compete with multi-billion dollar companies with enormous staffs that give away their server time for $0. There aren't enough human hours to go around.

Figma has ~1000 employees last I checked, and Adobe has nearly 30k. Orders of magnitude larger than most OSS projects.

So a lot of the time in OSS you end up choosing the work that keeps people interested (because often you don't have the money to do so). Developers want to build new features, and designers have next to no interest doing free work for OSS.

coding123• 3 years ago

FOSS doesn't have polish because the original devs plan on selling the polish

micromacrofoot2• 3 years ago

which OSS has done this?

matkoniecz• 3 years ago

in some cases this may be true, is false as general claim

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Ultimately, you have to have agency. The world is made by people who make so if you want something there's only one way to guarantee it: make it yourself.

If you don't want to make it, maybe you're lucky enough that there's a market and you can buy it.

But that's the deal with much of this stuff is that there's no polish because the builder didn't need it.

But that's not universal. I think many of BurntSushi's products have great polish and a good dev experience.

dandelany• 3 years ago

Unsurprisingly, the first 90% is a lot more fun than the "second 90%" (polishing)...

paxys• 3 years ago

It's not really about culture. Everyone – OSS or not – wants to write good software. The problem is that the "polish" you mention is what takes up the vast majority of development effort and costs, and FOSS projects just aren't that well funded. Hiring teams of designers, copywriters, user researchers and HCI experts, staffing up customer support teams in different timezones, having dedicated QA for every minor change, overprovisioning servers so the app can scale...none of these come free or easy.

TheOtherHobbes• 3 years ago

It's the last 90% of the work that takes 400% of the time.

d3w4s9• 3 years ago

...meanwhile, more than a few people on HN think all software should be FOSS and proprietary software is evil.

anon2912• 3 years ago

my most frequent (if potentially unfair) gripes with FOSS projects,

The difference is that you should not have any gripes with FOSS projects because they don't charge you anything, make no guarantees, and don't expect anything from you in return. In other words, your thoughts are irrelevant.

If you want something that works, pay for it.

If you want to play around and sometimes get stuff done, use FOSS. There's the exception for FOSS supported by big businesses, but this is not what people talk about when they talk about FOSS.

thiht• 3 years ago

If you want something that works, pay for it.

That’s literally what they’re doing, with proprietary software.

PhasmaFelis2• 3 years ago

I can't tell if this is meant to be defending FOSS or condemning it.

dylan6044• 3 years ago

$FOSS_Project description: reproduces a couple of features of well known applicationX

$FOSS_Project description: reproduces functionality of applicationX

how many people will be attracted to the first option vs the second?

jwells899• 3 years ago

Does it matter when the latter of those two turns off and loses the additional users it gained from the more enticing description because it’s half-baked and unpleasant to use?

Intuitively I’d think the former has better long term prospects, because it’ll have word of mouth (people love talking about things that make them happy) eventually make up for the reduced initial interest.

palata2• 3 years ago

First, I would like to suggest that you take a step back and think about how many non-FOSS projects are complete failures even though a ton of money was thrown into them. So yeah... there are good, average and bad FOSS projects just like there are good, average and bad proprietary projects.

Then, you have identified some characteristics of FOSS projects: some do tons of things somewhat passably (that's typically the case when the maintainers try to accommodate the contributors), some don't do much and don't get many contributions, some don't do much and just refuse contributions that the maintainers don't care about, etc.

But you have to understand that maintainers don't all have the same goals. I don't know if you have ever been a maintainer, but users can be real jerks. Almost blackmailing the maintainers ("if you don't implement this feature I won't use your software for free"), sometimes even being aggressive ("this project sucks, I spent 2 days trying to understand how to do that, if I had a choice I would use something else but I don't want to pay"). Almost nobody says "I will pay you to implement this feature properly and I don't expect you to maintain it for free forever".

It's hard to be a maintainer, and if you manage to do a good job and went for a permissive license, chances are that people (companies) will just use it without contributing anything back (not even honoring the attribution clause, because 99.999% of people don't understand that permissive licenses require attribution).

IMO companies would have to contribute much more if everything was copyleft (at least MPLv2).

eddiewithzato• 3 years ago

I don’t think a FOSS user facing product can actually work well. The ones that I found that worked very well (aesprite) actually just seemed to be founded by a single team that barely had any outside contributions. Basically they could’ve gone proprietary.

And I think it has to do with the nature of humans actually. Those in a company or team feel part of the tribe and are more than likely to feel good when they contribute. While a random person looking to contribute into some FOSS project would see it as some mountain.

Grimburger• 3 years ago

Devs do free work for the world and hand it out as FOSS. UX people feel no compulsion to do the same so that's why we have the current state of things.

These are two separate skillsets that often don't overlap, you won't find many UX people contributing to open source projects.

johnnyanmac8• 3 years ago

wonder why dev culture is so vastly difference from other sectors in that regard. I guess it's because tech is arguably useless as-is except to other experts. And even an expert may struggle whipping up a competitor from scratch (i.e. not copying the code unless allowed). Whereas even the layman can see "good" art and "good" UX.

But it's also not universally true. the acedemia sector of tech doesn't really open source stuff in the same regard. They may have some readable source, but you generally can't use it commercially without consulting the owners. I guess patents change a lot of how you work.

Roark66• 3 years ago

In my experience It depends on the kind of software you're talking about. If you mean especially GUI-heavy apps like Office/Libre Office Gimp/Photoshop FreeCAD/AnyCommercialCAD KiCAD/Altium yes your criticisms are valid. Mostly for the reasons others have said already.

However, consider other types of software with minimal gui for example Apache-Nginx/IIS, VisualBasic/Python, command line tools like awk, sed, shells like bash vs cmd. Lots of stuff.

It is a fact of life an Open Source model works better when no GUI is involved. Why? Because many people including myself find it mind numbingly boring and difficult at the same time to come up with a good, usable gui.

I bet there are at least 3 startups in the dark somewhere in the world working about AI generated UIs right now. If they succeeded that might be the thing OS software needs to be better.

jwells899• 3 years ago

It’s a bit tangential, but I find that how much I enjoy designing UIs depends a lot on the UI toolkit I’m using. With many, it’s as boring as you say, but there are a handful which have a large repertoire of capable, flexible widgets and designer program that makes the process something of a joy. AppKit on macOS is like this. Qt Widgets has a lot of the right ingredients but somehow misses the mark.

stevenhubertron• 3 years ago

And that is why Adobe purchased them for such a high value.

kaycebasques• 3 years ago

Great title. Made me chuckle out loud. Captures a sentiment around computers that we've all probably experienced quite viscerally...

swyx• 3 years ago

what about Excalidraw / TLDraw? there are so many of these canvas drawing apps[1]. draw on them, take a screenshot. doesnt export to svg but do people really need that?

[1] https://github.com/swyxio/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#ge...

humbugtheman• 3 years ago

tldraw does export to SVG!

lvl102• 3 years ago

Every time I use Figma, I say to myself, “so we are reinventing Dreamweaver” and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s absolutely absurd that Adobe bought Macromedia/Dreamweaver and did nothing with it. I have no doubt they will do the same thing with Figma. Yay product innovation!

RandallBrown• 3 years ago

I've used Figma a lot in the last few years but I haven't used Dreamweaver in over a decade.

I've never thought to compare them as similar tools and I still can't really understand the comparison. Figma feels a lot closer to Illustrator than Dreamweaver to me.

a1o3• 3 years ago

Illustrator that wishes to be Dreamweaver

Dachande663• 3 years ago

Dreamweaver or Fireworks. I miss FW so much. It had that perfect blend of vector, bitmap, and text handling. Figma is the closest anything’s come to matching it.

ksimukka• 3 years ago

I too miss Fireworks:

Antshockey• 3 years ago

Fireworks was the absolute best tool for anything graphical I've ever used

ToDougie• 3 years ago

I was able to work so much more effectively in Fireworks. RIP.

adfm• 3 years ago

Adobe could introduce a re-tooled Fireworks for teams and make a killing, but instead they went with XD, which failed to gain any traction, hence Figma.

wwweston• 3 years ago

That's enough of an endorsement I might give Figma another go.

I've delayed some macOS updates primarily because I don't want to leave FW behind, but it's getting to be well past time. Actually looking into acquiring a windows version / license so that I can run it virtualized on occasion. Wish there were something actively maintained that hit that same sweet spot.

mindcrash• 3 years ago

They will need to do something with it, because they killed Adobe XD for it.

If they don't do anything with it, this will drive people (back) to tools like Linearity, Pixelmator and Sketch in droves which will kill Creative Cloud - and the company.

Believe me that they will not do that.

gfodor• 3 years ago

I think you meant Fireworks and yeah.

hoofhearted2• 3 years ago

The sale of Figma to Adobe got blocked correct? Or did I miss something?

fasterthanlime5• 3 years ago

It hasn't been finalized yet, I link to a bloomberg piece in the article from 10 days ago that says it _looks_ like they're going to go back on it but nothing confirmed afaict.

gorjusborg• 3 years ago

Every time I use Figma, I think... weird they would put a tool on the web and not use the web (especially when it is used so often to prototype designs for the web).

Also, "what is taking so long for this page to load?".

codedokode2• 3 years ago

Exporting text as paths in SVG makes the text non-selectable and non-copyable. What SVG should have done, is to allow specifying both text and paths to draw the letters. This is one of multiple problems with SVG.

eviks2• 3 years ago

Indeed, how is killing text better than having it render differently on other platforms?

lmz• 3 years ago

The article said they initially used PNG screenshots so I guess it still works at being better than that.

10000truths• 3 years ago

You can embed the font file into the SVG if you want the text to remain selectable. If the size increase worries you, you can strip unused glyphs from the font file before embedding it.

fasterthanlime5• 3 years ago

Yes, PDF is what I really want, but apparently it didn't get the "<img> tag treatment" so, we have to leave with "SVG with text as paths, and perfect layout" or "SVG with embedded fonts (a subset if you're brave), and selectable text".

mrklol• 3 years ago

So the latter would be the best, correct? Isn’t it worse without text selection if a user wants to copy?

vic-traill• 3 years ago

That article has an odd cadence to it.

Makes it tougher to grok for me ....

auggierose• 3 years ago

I guess when you get people to pay for your product who REALLY REALLY don't want to, where every fiber of them screams, I DON'T WANT TO PAY, you got a winner on your hands. When a friend of mine spent $20 a month on a ChatGPT subscription, I couldn't believe it, he is very frugal with this stuff as well.

65• 3 years ago

I hate spending money on software. I pirated Adobe Creative Suite for years. I really, really did not want to pay the $55/month for a Creative Cloud subscription, but I had to. There are no great alternatives to Photoshop + Premiere + After Effects. I have Affinity Photo, I have Da Vinci Resolve, and Fusion. But at the end of the day Adobe makes the best video production/animation software. I reluctantly bought a subscription and it's been worth it for me. I still hate Adobe's business practices but their software is still extremely well made.

Gigachad3• 3 years ago

I so often see people complaining about the price of Adobe tools saying it's over the top or greedy, but then they continue to pay and use it despite cheaper alternatives existing.

Consider that the reason their software is so much better than the rest is _because_ they charge this much and can reinvest it in to the software.

dilyevsky• 3 years ago

That should be the definition of product market fit

wslh• 3 years ago

My company is also a Figma customer but for many diagramming stuff, more business oriented, I find Google Slides very handy for simple diagrams and good magnet connectors. In a distant the past I pivoted from Visio to Draw.io but always feel that draw.io seems like unfinished work after many years.

petetnt• 3 years ago

Instead of Draw.io or Figma (or Mermaid or any other option), I sketch around with Excalidraw and create diagrams with Miro. Miro took the world by the storm when corona hit and I am not super fond of the way people use it for everything from Kanban walls to whatever, but it does the diagram parts really well and works fast.

I bet I have wasted hundreds of hours fighting to get lines straight or arrows pointing to the correct direction with Draw.io - Miro they always just work.

pests• 3 years ago

This is the first time I've heard of Miro. Maybe the storm wasn't as big as you think?

pbowyer• 3 years ago

Similar, but I use Whimsical instead of Miro for diagrams.

starkparker• 3 years ago

Eng teams and PMs using Miro for retros and sprint planning is one of the stupidest tech trends I've seen in the last 2-3 years. Panning and zooming and manually sizing and moving post-it notes, we might as well do agile ceremonies in Tabletop Simulator.

MindTooth• 3 years ago

A colleague had a quick presentation on Penpot[1] a few weeks back. Was a real contender I think.

[1] https://penpot.app/

bbkane• 3 years ago

I take it you didn't read the article

catchmeifyoucan• 3 years ago

For diagrams, Excalidraw (https://excalidraw.com) is my favorite by a lot. Pretty low learning curve and you can use it as a single-player as many times (you'll have to export the older file)

jimnotgym2• 3 years ago

I was also taught "it's a poor craftsman that blames their tools", which apparently means "take responsibility for your fuckups", but, to young-me, definitely sounded more like "you don't deserve nice things".

This may be controversial. I think this phrase is very misunderstood. As a former craftsman I think the real meaning was more to do with how a real craftsman only has good tools and maintains them properly. They can't blame their tools, because they are beyond reproach.

jasonpeacock2• 3 years ago

A good craftsman learns how to use their tools to the best of their ability, including accommodating for their short-comings.

I've seen amazing work come from very simple/inexpensive tools, or even inappropriate tools, and crappy work come from very good tools.

The poor craftsman says "my works sucks because the tools suck", while the good craftsman learns to use what they have.

_dain_• 3 years ago

while the good craftsman learns to use what they have

No, he goes out and gets new ones or fixes/builds them himself. That's how I always understood the saying; the emphasis is on the word "blame" not the word "tool". It's about people who sit around and complain rather than taking action to fix the problem. It doesn't mean you should put up with shitty tools.

snoopen• 3 years ago

A good craftsman should also be capable of making and improving their own tools. A woodworker with a bad chisel simply reshapes it.

Relating back to software as tools, this only works if you have access to the tool code.

angry_moose• 3 years ago

That only partially works.

There's a huge difference in steel quality among chisels/cutting tools. Anyone can sharpen a $2 chisel so it cuts nicely once, but a $50 chisel will hold its edge longer and cut nicely hundreds of times.

There's only so much maintenance you can do on a bad tool.

fasterthanlime5• 3 years ago

I love that take on it, thanks for reconciling me with this saying.

muglug• 3 years ago

Things like vector networks (https://madebyevan.com/figma/introducing-vector-networks/), which immediately impose themselves as clearly superior to the classical "vector path" model literally everyone else is using.

This is Macromedia Flash erasure, which had all of the mechanics it seems Figma now has w/r/t paths.

nerpderp822• 3 years ago

I had the same experience with OmniGraffle, https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle

It just worked. There was support. I wouldn't dig a hole in the ground with my bare hands, why wouldn't I use good tools. Of course I would like to use F/OSS for various reasons.

The model I absolutely love is Jetbrains, their core product is OSS, Apache licensed. The whole thing, totally usable. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

The money I send their way does both, it pays for developers and it puts an amazing artifact in the world that others can use and learn from. If they weren't open source, I wouldnt pay for it. I don't know how many others are the same as me, but Jetbrains really deserves credit here.

makeitdouble• 3 years ago

Jetbrains' model is really the best of both worlds.

One reason I never could get into OmniGraffle: I can't just pass a file to a coworker to continue editing on their side, if they doesn't also pay for OmniGraffle. In contrast a plantUml/mermaid diagram will work, and they'll have the choice on how they want to edit it (albeit I don't think there is any good, non text based visual editors...)

A commercial player coming up with a very good plantUml/mermaid compatible visual editor would be a godsend (albeit, such a niche market I don't know if it would be profitable)

a1o3• 3 years ago

I really wish Akira (https://github.com/akiraux/Akira) had worked out :/

colonwqbang• 3 years ago

The PDF export function of draw.io doesn't really work, at least not with custom fonts.

What does work is to print the diagram to a PDF printer. This puts the diagram on a full A4 page so it's necessary to crop it afterwards. This can be done with some command line tool or other and automated using makefiles.

tristanho• 3 years ago

Sort of off topic, but for diagrams like the author seems to want (well, maybe a little lower fidelity, but good enough for any software system mapping I do), I love using Kinopio (kinopio.club)

Didn't see any mentions here.

biugbkifcjk• 3 years ago

I understand the sentiment. I have the same feeling regarding the use of LibreOffice. Full of features, most of which work "OK". But its absolutely infuriating to use for anything more than just a casual document/presentation etc.. Its severely lacking a level of polish, and the focus on getting real work done seems to be absent. I'm not talking about the UI, though that's certainly part of it, its the actual functionality that is overall a bad experience. Stuff like pressing undo which then breaks formatting of another component, then pressing redo to try and fix the other component which doesn't work, only to lose that work forever and needing to manually fix it again.

js4ever• 3 years ago

Happy to see my company Elestio is mentioned in the article as a way to deploy Penpot :)

https://help.penpot.app/technical-guide/getting-started/#ins...

yencabulator• 3 years ago

Rendering fonts into SVG paths destroys hinting, doesn't it?

therealmarv• 3 years ago

yed

Why not yed? It's totally free (but not open source) and the only tool I've found (ever) to replace MS Visio.

https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

they even have an online version nowadays (but I've never used the online version) https://www.yworks.com/yed-live/

chromakode• 3 years ago

Yes, using native SVG is a feature not a bug. As is using native text nodes. Converting to paths is a postprocessing step and not difficult to do.

The hard part is making a WYSIWYG editor, which both Figma and Penpot accomplish beautifully. The freedoms described in their marketing material may not be for you, but they are not indicative of poor quality.

Quality is an expression of priorities. I find this kind of rant frustrating because it's missing the forest for the trees.

Micoloth• 3 years ago

OH boy does this arricle resonate with me!

I didn’t grow up in a religious environement, but both the mindset you grew up in, and your personality, could very well be me.

I’m stll very much struggling with this, btw.. I *KNOW* paying for software is good because time is more important than money, but I still don’t know where to draw the line..

Should I pay 30€ for ChatGpt? And Photoshop? And Netflix? And then what? The stuff adds up…

bogwog• 3 years ago

I don't remember what the first software I purchased was, but after that point, I no longer was hesitant to spend money on good software. In hindsight, it was an irrational fear (maybe "fear" isn't the right word though). I'm not even a cheap person, I just always felt wrong paying money for any software that wasn't a video game. I wouldnt even buy dirt cheap mobile apps.

The only exception nowadays is subscriptions. I avoid those wherever I can, and will happily buy a more expensive/inferior alternative rather than pay a subscription. That might be irrational too, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm being ripped off and/or exploited any time I need to pay for a subscription.

Aeolun• 3 years ago

absolutely nobody should be running anything in production using a docker-compose file

Of all the text in the article, this is what I took issue with most.

Docker-compose is fine for running the vast majority of my stuff in production (combined with portainer).

ies7• 3 years ago

Somehow that sentence suddenly drop my interest with the article/author.

klooney• 3 years ago

Especially since he's just spinning it up occasionally for a blog post. What is the point of this yak shave?

lmm• 3 years ago

I was sympathetic to most of the leadup, but the conclusion seems to be that FOSS is fundamentally irretrievably broken because a) when you wilfully choose the hardest way to host something it's hard, but more importantly b) they made a different choice than the author wanted in a specific niche area of the product, because clearly any product that doesn't render text as uneditable SVG paths (and fuck anyone who wants to use a screenreader or translation tool amirite) is "not working".

JoeyBananas• 3 years ago

A long time ago, I decided there's nothing worth doing that is worth buying into proprietary software. But I understand that for the type of person who doesn't have any idea what they're doing, it's a whole different story.

If someone wants to argue "It just doesn't magically fall into my lap", there's no point in arguing. Ok, I'm sorry you don't understand computers. I'd also be frustrated I were you.

Scarbutt• 3 years ago

Why didn't the free version worked for him?

user_named• 3 years ago

Dealing with developers who insist on building their own or using an open source alternative of the industry leading paid option is a curse

stefandesu• 3 years ago

absolutely nobody should be running anything in production using a docker-compose file

(from the section about Penpot)

Is there any particular reason? Maybe it depends on what "in production" means for you, but all my homelab stuff runs in Docker using Compose files and it's completely solid. Only me and some friends are using it (mostly Nextcloud), so I don't see a reason to scale horizontally ever.

tamimio• 3 years ago

I just use Adobe XD.

logbiscuitswave• 3 years ago

I often have to do architecture diagrams and this usually involves Visio. Visio has design stuck in the past. It’s so amazingly clunky to use and even simple things like arranging or sizing shapes on a grid can be incredibly frustrating.

There’s a ton of shapes, but they are all inconsistent visually that mixing metaphors becomes a real mess. Search is terrible. I often find myself spending more just screwing around trying to get things laid out how I want than actually designing.

Figma isn’t really designed for this kind of thing but I find that with FigJam I can throw together really great flowcharts and infrastructure diagrams with really little effort. UML state diagrams and other things of that ilk are too much effort though.

Ultimately I work at a Microsoft shop so whatever I do in Figma ultimately ends up in Visio anyway but I find it faster to prototype in Figma and then adapt to Visio. (As frustrating as it is.)

Just paying Figma because nothing else works

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