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Comment by yesimahuman | Hacker News Reader

Sketch vs Figma is the famous example of this. By the time Sketch evolved beyond their native Mac app focus, Figma had already captured a ton of the market that wanted cross-platform and web support. Turns out that mattered a lot more than having a great native Mac app.

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I can’t understand how designers can work on the browser

It’s an horrible UX. No surprise it come out in these times where user interfaces are html documents masked as inconsistent UI.

Personally I think figma's ux is excellent. And the killer UX feature of being able to create a semi interactive demo and share it via a link is also excellent.

Can you give some examples of where figma's UX is worse than sketch's?

Figma is _fine_. My team recently switched from Sketch to Figma (I was involved in the decision), but I miss the niceness of Sketch.

Sketch is a real Mac app. Figma is a web app. There are important powers I have as a Mac user that aren’t there for Figma, no matter how much they work on the UI.

For example, besides just being hideously ugly and completely out of place on a Mac, Figma’s in-window menu system doesn’t let me assign my own shortcuts through System Preferences. I had lots of those for Sketch. Also, it uses its own menu search instead of the native Help menu. And right-click menu doesn’t use Mac services, so I can’t use other parts of my system to alter things quickly.

The toolbar isn’t customizable. This is one of the best features of real Mac apps, and honestly should be a power tool basic requirement.

Copying content in Figma copies weird Figma-only content, rather than providing multiple versions of that content on the clipboard for the paste consumer to use. Try copying from Figma into Slack (another UI story of “hey it’s good enough”). Or into any Mac app.

Windows restore in weird places and spaces when restarting. Windows behave weirdly in a dozen subtle but annoying ways.

Text editing is subtly different from that of true native Mac apps.

Color display is sometimes slightly different from native Mac apps, presumably due to color profiles, though I’m not sure. Sketch just always gave me consistently right colors, including mirroring on my phone, and Figma fails, especially with oranges. This warrants more investigation and work on my part, but is annoying.

Dragging things into or out of Figma sucks. Probably related to the copy/paste story.

There are genuinely dozens of other examples I could give. This is the tool I live in day in and day out. I’m a craftsman, I care about my tools, and honestly I don’t love this one.

BUT! Figma offers compelling features that made it an obvious choice over Sketch, and not just the “collaboration” stuff. Auto layout, decent prototypes, better color and component overrides, and a bunch of others. And to a real but lesser extent, web-first documents for the broader team.

EDITED TO ADD: Also, Figma has branching and merging! Super cool, and well implemented.

I _wish_ Sketch had been the winner on features, because I have joy using it. But it wasn’t the winner, for us. But that’s a failure of Sketch, not a condemnation of native Mac apps broadly. But please know Figma drives me crazy, because it’s not a native Mac app, and that has real UX downsides.

Honestly, we had some frustrations at first switching from Sketch to Figma but those frustrations were short-lived as all the benefits far outweighed any potential limitations. We’ve been on Figma for years now and are extremely happy we switched. It’s better in too many ways to count imo.

Figma killer feature is developer handoff. When designers use Adobe XD or Sketch it's a pain, but with Figma developers on Linux can access design documents as well.

I think the browser experience is bad but not horrible. The pros outweigh the cons when it comes to a tool like figma compared to sketch, a designer doesn't have to save and sync files, everything is async and all in one place, it makes collaboration very easy.

This comment is a shallow dismissal, which is looked down upon by the HN guidelines. Your first sentence doesn't need to exist, and as for the latter ones, please elaborate on your opinion as to what exactly is a "horrible UX".

Yeah this is something that was brought home to me when my nine year old son wanted to design his own deck of playing cards

I thought about giving up my Mac so he could use Sketch. But then my partner suggested he try Figma on his iPad

I connected my old Magic Mouse and keyboard up to his iPad, Air-dropped the initial Sketch file we had made to him, and imported it into Figma. Once I taught him the basics of components, transforms and the shapes and vector tool he was up and running (I was pretty strict about naming his layers properly!). He quickly got through the whole deck in two suits

It still bothered me though: why was Figma using windows hotkeys, except for copy and paste? Why did the layers panels sometimes not scroll all the way to the bottom, text editing was clunky, things didn't feel quite as smooth. But it did the job

Figma is a C++ application compiled to webasm that paints to a blank canvas for the majority of it's usage. It's about as 'web' as the unity game engine compiling to web. In development they compile to a macOS app and use instruments to profile it.

The platform is still web, even if it's not using HTML and CSS. The success of figma has lead to a lot of start ups targeting the web as there main platform, but using WASM (C++ or Rust) and WebGL (soon WebGPU). This makes sense in creative tools, I think. We're also starting to see tools that run on the server and stream video to the browser.

Christ, don't get me started on that last point. One of the most egregious examples I've ever heard of is Mighty, an app that streams Chrome from a server to your laptop, because apparently fixing Chrome's performance is too much of a hassle that now we need to send a video of our browser back to us.

And the worst part is, they might win. Lots of apps are web based with WASM and WebGL like you say, which are purely client side, and lots of people that need to do work might not have good enough computers to run such apps, if we assume (and I believe this to be true) that applications with more and more complexity will be pushed onto the web browser as the universal app interface. If a server can render those apps better and send them back, the client doesn't have to any work.

We continuously invent and reinvent the terminal/mainframe architecture, it appears like.

Basically what was done in X Windows and Citrix/RDP is now the browser's role, and the wheel keeps on turning.

> And the worst part is, they might win

Might? They will win, is it not obvious at this point that every single app in the near future will be sandboxed in some way? The unix grey beards had a couple decades to prove they could write secure software and they failed.

Or to write a UIKit that works across Windows, Linux and macOS with no hassle, making cross-platform development easier. But no, we have 3 SDKs on a single platform already and it apparently is confusing.

Oh wait, they did create a true cross-platform platform: the browser.

It is so cross platform, that some think it is too much work to support various browsers so they bundle Chrome with the application.

Could be worse I guess, there are those that ship a whole OS with the application.

it's not very "web" if you're concerned about the philisophical purity of the web as a mechanism for distributing html documents.

but if you just want an app that works reliably without having to worry about what type of computer you work on, it's very "web". in my books, the ability to compile a unity game to run on the web is exactly why web apps are so great right now.

When people complain about electron and web apps being wastes, what they are really complaining about is javascript, html and webdev practices. When your using C++ & OpenGL your skipping most of that. OSes can also add a chromium detection layer and make it first class like the rest of the OS system libraries too, because at this point it might as well be.

It runs in a web browser. It's a web app.

I don't know about that, most designers i know stick with Sketch. Figma captured everyone else except the designers - i guess we'll find out how useful that is.

The funniest thing about this is that Sketch used to claim that it was impossible for them to port it to other platforms (i.e. Windows or Linux, let alone web) because only Mac OS had the kind of APIs the app needed to even work.

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