Official Apple Design Resources for Figma – iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 | Hacker News Reader

Official Apple Design Resources for Figma – iOS 17 and iPadOS 17

figma.com

185 pointssamwillis39 comments

This is significant because all previous iOS resources attempting this level of detail have been created by the design community. A designer named Joey Banks created widely adopted UI Kits for iOS 13-16[1]. Earlier iOS resources were created by an agency called Teehan+Lax[2] and some others I’m forgetting now.

All community-created design resources have historically been really good best guesses. Now they’re available directly from Apple.

Apple is letting design teams reveal what’s happening on the inside a little bit and this is one example.

[1] https://www.figma.com/@joey [2] https://teehanlax.com/tools/

Hasn't Apple been providing Sketch resources for several years?

Yes. And Photoshop. And Adobe XD. I just checked and they still made those available this year too. I’m guessing Apple probably made previous libraries available for Figma too but I can’t say that for sure.

Where have they made these resources available in the past?

I was under the impression that the 3rd party projects were so popular because of a lack of such resources from Apple.

Is it just that the Figma-native assets are new?

Yes, they have had these assets available for 5+ years https://developer.apple.com/design/resources/

Figma is new.

I don’t believe so—I distinctly remember searching their site last month for an official Figma UI kit, and they only had Sketch and Adobe.

The iOS 17 assets for Figma are new. Which, whew, thank you, Apple.

The linked Figma resources in the OP still aren’t available on https://developer.apple.com/design/resources/

This is very, very not true.

https://developer.apple.com/design/resources/

I ran a design agency 6 years ago and we used the official Apple Resources. The Teehan+Lax stuff and designers making it themselves was all pre-flat design, during the skeuomorphic age. Joey's stuff is because they didn't have the iOS13-16 resources for Figma.

Sure there are design resources but look at the resources themselves and compare them to Joey’s stuff.

I may be remembering incorrectly, but when I used Sketch the Apple design resources weren’t as comprehensive.

Wow, that Teehan+Lax page takes me back!

So this is notable, for some value of notable, because Apple has not provided Figma assets before.

They have provided really quite good Sketch UI kits up until now.

https://developer.apple.com/design/resources/

Depending on how much Kremlinology you want to indulge in, this is either…

(a) Apple recognizing what tools its users use, and providing useful assets

(b) Apple is giving in by not promoting the platform-native Sketch app and accepting they are being washed away by the tide of cross-platform Electron apps†

(c) Apple is engaging in a Big Corporation conspiracy with Adobe, the probable new owners of Figma, to lock you into proprietary subscription software forever and ever

† yes, I know Figma is not Electron, it is a wild cross-platform browser runtime unto itself, but you know what I mean

FINALLY. I only have Sketch installed so I can use Apple design resources to build icons and such. The raster ones don’t work well in Pixelmator, and Photoshop is too expensive for something I use every 3 months. I’m very happy they’re publishing Figma resources.

Have you tried Affinity Photo as a raster editor alternative? https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

Affinity user since day one but the whole suite is just so sluggish.

It wasn’t always. That’s a shame to hear if it’s getting significantly slower.

For me, it's a lot faster than PhotoShop. Could it be a Mac vs Windows thing?

Right, I forgot it’s on windows now. Maybe it’s slower on there, because it seems very snappy on macOS still but I have nothing to compare it to (I think I’ve been affinity-only for close to 10 years!)

Keep an eye out on Adobe's site, they often run 50% off deals, especially for Black Friday etc. I'm paying 50% off right now and for some reason they just emailed and gave me another two months free just on "GP".

Apple seems to be turning a bit of a corner with the 17 release. Loosening up the app store restrictions, and now this.

Any good summary of what restrictions they've loosened?

They recently added a bunch of features to iOS Safari to allow webapps to run much better as offline apps; web push, badging, opening in a third-party browser, etc. https://webkit.org/blog/13878/web-push-for-web-apps-on-ios-a...

They're being brought onboard to the Mac now, including the ability to add one to your dock. https://webkit.org/blog/14205/news-from-wwdc23-webkit-featur...

Not really but I noticed during their keynote they kept mentioning that features and apis would be opened to 3rd party apps. In the past these sort of features were always exclusive to apple’s own apps and considered part of their moat.

It’s a developer conference; it’s always been about announcing new features and APIs for third parties.

Not that I know of - that comment of mine was a bit vague. I'm actually not sure if it's in this exact release, but I've heard that (a) Apple is going to allow you to publish an app outside of the app store, and (b) they don't make you pay the $100 dev fee unless you actually want to publish your app. Both of those are really positive changes for the developer experience.

I guess it's a natural move once you realize that regulators starts to take a closer look at what you've been doing.

Is the generated code any good?

I wouldn’t ever use any of the code figma provides for ios currently but i also still use xib extensively. But i also it’s very hard for other developers who have not had extensive experience with that sort of ui building to understand and decipher something that has shit tons of trait based constraints and properties embedded in it. Also, the conflicts that happen should any 2 people work on the same file are horrible.

So, swiftui is inevitable and seems preferable to me to the kind of code figma produces which gives no indication of the final result.

For those who are curious (like me), Human Interface Guidelines and design templates for visionOS will be published later this month alongside the first visionOS developer seed.

(source: WWDC23 Slack)

Where's macOS though

Wish designers would use SwiftUI directly, like the ones who can prototype html/css components/layouts

How would they do that?

Self-promotion warning: I make an app that’s a design tool for SwiftUI, aimed at designers who don’t use code. It’s called DetailsPro.

Right now, it’s a bit basic, but I’m planning on adding prototyping, animation, and generally expanding its capabilities throughout the year.

I too agree it’d be great if designers could use SwiftUI because then you’re getting instant validation the whole time that your design is possible.

https://www.detailspro.app

Nice! I’ll try to use this on the next project that I design.

check the wwdc session on it

Poor Joey. Or maybe he’s relieved now.

It was probably some weird legal reason that they couldn't do this before.

Such as…?

Same reason why they didn't use github for a while - they didn't like the standard ToS so negotiated certain clauses.

But they did this before over the past years, except not in Figma.

Exactly.

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