Dev Mode. Vision Pro. RIP XD.
Adobe Gives Up on Web-Design Product to Rival Figma After Deal Collapse
(Archive link without a Bloomberg paywall.) RIP Adobe XD. The writing was on the wall even back in 2022, but now I wonder if Adobe will just leave a big gap in a cohesive offering of the Creative Suite? Lively discussion at Hacker News.
“When it agreed to buy Figma, which helps users design app and website interfaces, Adobe put its competing program XD in “maintenance mode,” ceasing to launch new features or sell it individually. The deal to purchase Figma fell apart under regulatory pressure in December and the creative software giant hadn’t announced whether it would resurrect XD or attempt to build another competitor. “We have no plans to further invest in it,” a spokesperson said Tuesday of XD.”
Everything you need to know about Dev Mode
Dev Mode moved out of beta last week, and in this article, the Figma team talks about their product philosophy, how they’re improving the experience for developers and designers, and what’s coming next. There are new features that bring design and code closer together, including annotations in Dev Mode, along with improvements to compare changes, plugins, and the Figma for VS Code extension.
How it started: “We needed a team that lived and breathed development like we did design, so in 2021, we acquired Visly — a team of eight designers and engineers who built a tool for developing UI components in React. […] The Visly team brought with them years of hands-on experience and months of research on developer tooling — in other words, they had the developer “intuition” we were looking for.”
How it’s going: “Dev Mode aims to make you more productive by connecting the tools you use and your code components to the design file. There’s no one way to work, which is why we built Dev Mode to adapt to a variety of tools, processes, and workflows. Whether you’re looking to link design and code with Storybook, ensure accessibility with Stark, or streamline project management with Jira, Linear, and GitHub, plugins allow you to extend Figma’s functionality to flex however your team works.”
The art and science of annotations in Dev Mode
Always love deep dives from people behind the features! Product Designer Oscar Nilsson explains how Annotations came to be — for both design and development. On why annotations are in the Dev Mode: “We wanted one dedicated space to curate a spec for developers and call out necessary details or areas of confusion, so we ultimately decided that designers should go to Dev Mode to annotate. In doing so, designers would see exactly what their developer counterpart sees while annotating, and they could share a link to Dev Mode when they’re done. Our goal is not for Dev Mode to silo developers once a designer’s work is done — but to engage the broader team in the product development process, with annotations being a first, crucial step.”
On positioning in context: “Testing and iterating on our positioning logic became an adventure on its own. We explored a direction in which annotations hide until you click on a corresponding frame. That felt right in theory, but once we actually tried it, we realized that it was still easy to miss out on important annotations if you were just looking at a frame without actively selecting it. We then iterated on different versions of automatically expanding annotations based on zoom level and position, and it immediately felt more intuitive.”