Penpot Alpha Release – Free and Open-Source Design Plattform | Hacker News Reader

Penpot Alpha Release – Free and Open-Source Design Plattform

penpot.app

133 pointsstephdin26 comments

We're presenting Penpot at FOSDEM (online) this Sunday in case anyone wants to know more about the project: https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/penpot_design_freedom...

I think it is hard to overstate how impressive this is. While it aims to be well integrated in tech workflows, it is a product that allows designers to work well, with a nice, usable and useful UI.

For the few designers in open source, designing with open source software is often a love/hate activity: We want to use and support open software, but it often is painful to use, lacks features relevant for design activities (which, yes, can mean: Being similar to industry standard products) while at the same time being overflowing with settings.

Trying penpot makes me look forward to a product with a clear vision and great utility.

wow... I just screenshot this and shared it with the Penpot team. No need for comment, really. You got it. Thank you.

As a regular user of Figma, I am blow away. I did a quick mockup, and it runs as well as figma on my browser. Silky smooth zooms,pans etc.

I briefly played with components, pasted screenshots, and drew rectangles & shapes (80% of UI design is drawing rectangles :-). Yet to play with Prototypes.

Kudos to the team... extremely impressive alpha.

Yeah, that's one of reasons we went for clojure and clojurescript, to get that smoothness and performance. I'll send those amazing kudos to the team in 3, 2, 1... :)

From the same developers of Taiga, which IMHO is a criminally underrated open source alternative for Agile Development

Hey taiga lover, I feel you :) Today we released Taiga6 BTW (https://blog.taiga.io/taiga6-release.html), but we didn't want to steal penpot's thunder. We think Taiga6 will make things right. Anyway, Penpot is just so amazing! It should have existed 10 years ago, oh well, here it is

Heh, once again, hackernews makes a difference. Thank you guys! https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtQIzT9XIAA5DRJ?format=jpg&name=...

Wow! I'm quite impressed!

An open source sketch-like app with the collaborative aspects of figma? Multiple shadow layers? all of the google fonts already there? Wow! Sign me up! I figure if it came in the desktop version it would eat up a quite bit of sketch/figma market.

Stuff I seem to be missing at first:

1. Double click to go to Component definition

2. Resize/collapse sidebars

3. I get an internal error on shift+click in the Pages sidebar

4. Gets quite stuttery in large document, but well, first version, what can you do.

Wow, thats great feedback, let me write all that down! I'll tell you this already, desktop version is on the roadmap, we will probably produce an electron-based "native" app that can "install". We kind of like the idea of having the best of both worlds. That's also the beauty of open source, what's the risk really? Feel free to go to https://github.com/penpot/penpot and elaborate on those topics! Thank you!

Oh right, it's open source. Wanted to ask if you use any engines for the layouting part, but I can just check. See, I'm so used to all these tools being closed source I forgot I can open up an issue. I'll get to it after exploring a bit more. Hope the electron app can sustain performance!

I'm very back-end oriented (read basically 0 design knowledge and 0 knowledge of design tools). Whenever my friends wanted to show me something on Figma or I had to sketch something on Figma I strongly disliked it. I get overwhelmed in the interface and have no idea how to do some basic stuff. I think that's mainly because there are too many options, when really I just want to do some basic stuff.

I just tried doing some quick sketches in Penpot for a project I was working on, and found the interface way better for my use case. Granted that I didn't spend a lot of time in Figma or Penpot, but for the amount of time I've spent in each app, Penpot seems superior to me in terms of usability for my use cases as someone who just needs something quick and simple.

Thanks! Very promising. Another thing that surprised me is low latency and usability: I signed up, clicked "New Project" and it showed me editor. Like INSTANTLY.

I hope it'll be more or less on the same level later. It feels like magic especially after extremely slow and laggy Figma (seriously, modern 3D games with tons of polygons are working much smoother than web-based tool for drawing colorful rectangles).

Awesome work!

Looks neat! Will it be cable of importing and exporting in various formats? Figma, XD, Sketch, etc?

Yes, proprietary format import/export is on our roadmap. We have given priority to the feel-at-home experience rather than going for format compatibility. Also SVG posed many challenges. But yeah, I think we'd start with Figma, since it was the team knows best

I've been working on a similar project - open source interface design tool with SVG as document format. Glad to see others think it's a good idea, too.

There's an impressive amount of functionality just in the alpha release. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves!

It's evolving as we speak. Full-time excellent team, go go go!

Really cool. I think using standard JS or TS with a standard UI framework (like Vue, React, Svelte, etc.) would have attracted more contributors than Clojure.

But otherwise , I'm really looking forward that project !

I hear you! The thing is that sometimes (only sometimes) you do need to use the best technology for a project. In this case, Penpot's very own nature demands technology that is super-performant manipulating zillions of vectors and mathematical objects. I'm not saying you couldn't do this with standard JS or TS but to reach this status in 1 year we needed to go for this route. Anyway, we have plans for a more straightforward plugin contribution architecture so that shouldn't be a problem, but the "core core", yeah, it was our choice, same with SVG, a tough choice but it was worth the challenge. Thanks!!!

That seems totally fair, thanks for your response. If the core is powerful thx to the choice of tech while plugins can be contributed easily then it sounds like a great plan !

I'd love to see this succeed, but while Figma is pretty much free for most cases.... ?

Yeah, if you are a freelancer and don't interact much with tech teams, I'd say yes. But Penpot is open source, SVG based, you can go cloud or on premise, meant to engage with devs also. I think we've got a different approach here. But yeah, it's quite a challenge. So what :)

I just got a Figma Educational license two days ago. I'm likely going to just work with Penpot, instead. I'm so glad to see you guys here. It's certainly worth the development, considering how quickly prices raise at Figma when working with teams.

That's the thing with proprietary tools. You're always always trapped. To be completely honest, when we were considering Penpot's huge roadmap we told ourselves "even if it's just the tool for education, universities, etc, that'll be fine". It turned out to be much more than that, but I see where you're coming from. And hey, if you'd like to fiddle with the code yourself or install it locally... be my guest.

I will gladly pay for this as a hosted service. This is amazing!

awesome

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