Desktop Kit | Hacker News Reader

Desktop Kit

facebook.design

105 pointsmichelephant18 comments

Just open the link - it's not "Facebook for desktop" app. It's a toolset for their Sketch app for desktop UI elements.

"This document was created with a newer version of Sketch. Please upgrade to the latest version and try again."

I bloody hate this idiotic approach of licensing. I have Sketch 43 and because my license expired, I cannot upgrade to 44 and there is no backward compatibility between versions. Basically Sketch is forcing me to pump up yet another lump of money.

Think about it from the developer standpoint. I've added a new feature to my files. Either i go give all the old versions support for that new feature (free upgrade) or i say "listen, if you want to use the new stuff, get the latest version. Otherwise, continue to use the working version you have with the working set of features it had when you bought it."

to me this is a totally reasonable thing for developers to do.

Teehan + Lax is showing...

I thought the same thing! Small design agencies could justify investing time and effort to craft resources like this as it signaled craft and quality. Facebook doesn't really have any justification, they're only doing it because that spirit lives on in those acquired by the beast.

Came here to say the same thing :) glad to see the craft spirit lives on from the agencies they’ve picked up.

For those thinking if it means Facebook Desktop app, I highly doubt it. Most likely Dock icon in the examples is a good indication why they made it -- Facebook's Origami Studio, a design prototyping tool.

Or it's about Facebook Messenger / Workplace desktop app.

On the one hand, a Facebook Messenger app would have people spending less time on the website.

On the other, Facebook would use it to mine more usage information from your computer than they can get to from inside the browser sandbox.

Presumably they'd sidestep the Mac App Store's sandboxing requirement and just distribute it through their website.

They're already kind of separating Messenger from the main Facebook site. It's a separate app on mobile, and on desktop you can go to https://messenger.com. They don't even have Facebook in the name anymore.

Facebook, like all major software companies, is concerned about corporate platform dominance. As long as they're controlling the underlying platform, they are happy.

As a sibling commenter says, they already have non-Facebook-branded messaging apps, including messenger.com, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Expanding that surface area to include those who still manually install desktop messengers is natural.

Why didn't you just click the link before adding this comment? It's a Sketch template.

I'm well aware it's a Sketch template, designer here. My comment is a speculation why Facebook's Design team would be producing Desktop design templates considering they don't make any native apps yet.

Maybe they have their own private desktop apps for internal use.

What is sketch? The page doesnt actually say. (I assume its some graphics tool).

Some of us not in facebook land have no idea what some of these things mean!

https://www.sketchapp.com/ (great tool, don't like that it's a subscription model). The target audience is designers. I was just confused when the button said "download sketch" while it should probably be "download templates for sketch(tm)". For a second I thought it was a special build of sketch.

How is it a subscription model?

It’s not a "subscription" model in the way that Adobe CC is (you pay $99 for updates for a year, rather than for access to the software itself). But most designers I know still describe it as a subscription because, as soon as you fall behind on the updates, you start to lose file compatibility with your colleagues or external agencies, effectively forcing you into a $99/yr recurring payment.

You outside of Facebook land also can't Google I see.

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