“Code Connect is a tool for design systems and engineering teams to bring component code into Dev Mode. When inspecting a component with connected code snippets, developers will see design system code from their libraries instead of auto-generated code.” Currently in beta. Available on Enterprise or Organization plans only.

“Managing your team’s community resources just got simpler. Now you can save, approve, and manage resources for your entire organization without switching profiles or ​‘browsing as admin.’”

Tom Lowry walks through recent updates to branches — the default zoom level of previews is increased to 150%, the full branch name is now visible on hover, better text legibility, transparent backgrounds for effects, a few changes to improve review of variables, and bug fixes.

Figma is bringing together the design systems community on April 16 to share new features, best practices, and a peek into what’s coming next in the half-day event. ​“We’ll share more about new capabilities to make design systems more powerful and easier to adopt, as well as features to connect your system closer to code. Our product sessions will dive deep into strategies for structuring and maintaining your system.”

Considering it’s only a couple of months until Config 2024, it’s pretty clear they will put a bow on some of the features announced last year. Typographic variables, anyone?

On April 1st, Figma makes URLs shorter and easier to read. If you call Figma’s REST APIs, embed files in your websites or apps, or use these URLs in your plugin or widget, you may need to make a few tweaks to your code.

Now you can use the power of AI to generate and expand mindmaps and create visual timelines in FigJam. See examples in the gallery of ready-made FigJam AI prompts.

“Over the next few weeks, we are replacing the bottom right notification button for library updates and replacing with a new library icon for faster entry to library management.”

Use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out. Right-click and drag to pan around a file.

An update to file search — now you can filter results by owner, type, or organization/​team/​project.

There were hints about split tabs for a while, and now they’re available in the beta version of the desktop app. Luis highlights some of the use cases in this thread, including keeping a prototype on the side, managing variables, iterating on designs at different zoom levels, updating local components, and many more.

Multi-edit is a powerful feature with many nuances when it comes to editing a series of related mockups or updating component variants, so Miggi prepared an entire playlist of videos covering every aspect in full depth. I highly recommend setting aside 30 minutes to watch them all in order.

Org and Workspace admins on the Enterprise plan can now mark libraries as approved for the organization or workspaces they manage. ​“Approved libraries are badged with a checkmark and pinned to the top wherever they appear — be it in the assets panel, the properties panel, the admin console, etc. Approved libraries help users know which libraries are sanctioned by their admins and help them find them more easily.”

“We’ve expanded our EU file hosting capabilities to support localization of videos and images in addition to previously supported assets. For Figma Enterprise accounts that are configured for EU file hosting, this upgrade will be applied to your account automatically with no action required on your part.”

A few updates to granting or managing access to teams and projects (currently being rolled out). These include improved UI for the teams and projects share dialog, roles for team members on a project, and audience setting on teams and users will have the ability to directly control the audience setting on projects.

A big release of ​“squeaky stairs” fixes to the prototyping! First, the inline preview now shows mobile prototypes in draggable and resizable device frames. For a deep dive on this, see the article Behind the feature: Inline device frames.

Second, there are multiple improvements to the editing speed — copy and paste noodles and interactions to a different element; delete noodles and associated interactions; delete a starting point by dragging the ​“flow label” outside of the frame; disable all shortcuts on a prototype; enable multiple ​“After Delay” events on every node; use the ​“Change to” interaction on a nested variant; auto-exit the Scale tool when switching to the Prototype tab; copy a link to the selected flow; resize the inline preview to the actual size of the prototype, and auto-focus on the input when creating a new flow.

Third, improvements to prototyping with variables — when copying and pasting an element with a local variable bound to it, Figma will create a new collection with the copied variable; overlays now inherit the mode of the frame linking to them; negative numbers support in the expression builder; support for ! or not in a boolean conditional check (yay!), and string values ​“true” or ​“false” can be bound to instance visibility in addition to booleans. Prototyping performance has also improved, cutting down loading spinners by 22%.

Finally, the width and height values can now be set to zero, so we don’t need to rely on the 0.001 hack anymore! For a nice roundup of the above improvements, see threads by prototyping PM Garrett Miller and designer Niko Klein.

Creating beautiful gradients in Figma just got easier! New controls for flipping and rotating gradients (see why they’re separate controls), displaying the gradient stop position in percentage (another yay from me!), and even better-looking defaults (although they’re bringing back the old behavior if you add a gradient on top of another fill).

Anthony DiSpezio shows how merge reviews now ignore top-level sections, allowing you to review changes at the frame or component level.

“Some Figma features require users to upload or retrieve content from our servers (e.g. publishing a library, adding media to comments), but customers might have strict firewall settings that block these actions. Searching for ​“Check network settings” in quick actions will open a network settings modal, which indicates whether any of these services are blocked. IT admins can update their firewall’s allowlist to restore access. This modal is also accessible via a visual bell if users run into errors trying to use features blocked by their firewall settings.”

The new Figma for Jira app is now generally available, with a couple of new features — searching for linked Figma designs in Jira issues using Jira Query Language, and creating design automations in Jira to notify you of changes to designs, transition issue statuses, and easily add labels to issues with designs.

Molly spotted a nice improvement to opening a plugin from the Community — now they can be opened in a recent file instead of creating a new empty file in Drafts.