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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Is this attempting to throw some shade on Figma to counteract lost sales?

Presumably - Sketch is great software, well built, but the fact that in late 2020 they still have to write "And soon, the ability to collaborate in real-time" is the the best counter-argument to building native for me personally.

This is somewhat orthogonal, but I don’t understand the draw of real-time collaboration.

As a designer, I’d much rather collaborate via the Git-like system of Abstract, committing changes and merging pull requests than have things happening elsewhere in the file I’m working on with no versioning or notification.

Real-time collaboration has never been in demand among developers, has it?

Collaboration doesn’t necessarily mean designing at the same time, it’s not really how any designers I know use it. It’s being able to walk through a design, leave comments, use it for quickly showing off an idea within a file, having another designer point you to a shared component/asset/prototype. We even use it for retrospectives and hangouts.

I think the reason that people want real-time collaboration has been that merging diffs, which is already a hassle for code, has historically not really been possible for designers. With realtime collaboration, you can have people working in parallel without having to solve the merging problem.

Real time collaboration is hard to get right so it not being in demand might be a chicken and egg problem.

VSCode's liveshare feature is getting very close though and it does feel great to attack a challenge together from time to time.

Ability to collaborate in real-time is not something exclusive to web apps.

Correct, but as a feature it is exclusive to "apps other than Sketch"

of course not, but the effort to bring real-time collaboration to native apps is much higher, e.g. MS Office's still-poor current experience compared with Google Docs's capabilities 5 years ago

Not really. It all comes down to a network protocol to sync changes. I collaborated with others just fine in desktop-first apps like CounterStrike or Diablo long before web became a viable platform.

The reason MS Office struggles with this is that rebuilding an app that wasn't originally supposed to work in such mode is way harder than building from scratch, and they probably don't really need it that much to push themselves in such an adventure.

Counter Strike and Diablo are built with collaboration (multiplayer) in mind.

How does the existence of Google Docs and Word say anything about how hard it is to create real-time collaboration on a web application versus a native application?

It doesn't. It's a non-sequitur.

There’s no technical reason why that would be true. What is true is if you have an app and doc format that weren’t designed for real-time collaboration, it’ll be really hard to retrofit, regardless of your choice of app platform.

It'd take a lot for me to leave Figma for another tool, performances are rock-solid on my 2015 low-end MBP in the browser, granted I'm not working on the most complex UIs but I've yet to see limitations.

I do not miss Sketch one bit.

Feels like it. Don’t get me wrong, I think sketch is great, but no way i’m going into apple’s walled garden voluntarily. Very happy that figma works on linux.

So you prefer to be locked in to a server that really serves someone else? [0]

At least, with Sketch/macOS the code is executed on the device you can control (to a degree).

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

Sketch is not libre software, so there's not much difference as long as you can export.

There is a whole world of difference. Figma's servers can be down when you need it to work, developers might want to 'phase out' the function you need, or introduce some changes that would totally break your workflow, and you will be absolutely powerless to do anything about it but conform.

With locally running app you control when and where the app works, and you have way more options when developer introduces some changes that don't fit you.

Meh. I can't open any of our old sketch files at work because I don't have a valid license for a version that works on the newest OS. All the same as being locked out of a server in the moment.

This does not make any sense, newer versions of Sketch open old files just fine, and licences are valid for any version.

Maybe you were trying to say that you can't open new sketch files because your version of macOS doesn't support latest versions of Sketch? That is, indeed, a problem. However, if you work only with internal files, you can simply abstain from upgrading to new version and keep working on the version that works for you. Moreover, Sketch licences do not 'expire', you simply can't receive updates any longer. So you can still work with your files as long as you need, not relying on someone else's actions.

Except one is your choice, the other you have no control over?

Not to mention sensitive design documents that must stay on-prem can't be uploaded to cloud services like Figma (I don't know if this is possible to do in Figma somehow? I've never looked into it)

I want to get things done. I value concrete benefits now versus theoretical potential benefits in the future. I'm looking for tools to help me get work done and not a religious philosophy.

That's exactly how China become an economical superpower, while at the same being environmentally irresponsible and lacking any semblance of human rights. People just wanted cheap stuff that gets the work done, rather than what's right.

By paying for any tool you are strengthening its position and philosophy, whether you care about it or not.

Since you want to make it political. It's how every country ever became an economic superpower. Then many decided to clean up their acts since they could divert resources to it at little relative cost. The countries that tried to do the right thing from the beginning didn't get into that club. Most of them then were destroyed by the superpowers in one conflict or another. Moral of that story is to be pragmatic until you're at the top since otherwise it won't much matter.

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