Major update to the Figma mobile app. Now you can view, browse, and share files and prototypes without being tethered to the desktop app, mirror designs on mobile for selected frames on desktop, and enjoy an intuitive and performant UX on iOS and Android.

“Use link previews to add sources of inspiration and useful context to your FigJam file. Paste links of rich media from other websites — like videos, articles, or documents — and FigJam will turn them into a preview on your board. Figma will even make some link previews interactive, which allow you to pan around Figma design files and city maps, or stream music and videos while you work in FigJam.”

A few good tips on using Auto Layout by Danny Sapio.

Grapic is the iPhone app and a FigJam widget that lets you use a real pen, paper, and whiteboards with your remote colleagues, clients, and friends.

“This month, we introduced capabilities that move you from task to task faster and make it easier to share and act on feedback, so you can take ideas from good to great.”

A FigJam widget to help your group take turns. Keep track of whose turn it is, who’s already gone, and who’s left.

A lightweight plugin that converts high-fidelity mockups to loading or ​“skeleton” screens.

“Associates colors to styles if it finds matching or very similar ones.”

“We’re bringing our open platform to FigJam so developers can build plugins and widgets to automate workflows and engage the entire team. Widgets are interactive, native-like objects — like polls, games, and notepads — that the entire team can use together. Hear from Figmates and developers from the Community to see how you can build your own!”

While this approach feels backwards, I think it’s an interesting idea to explore for the developer handoff. Auto Layout is quite close to Flexbox, so creating a universal utility wrapper shouldn’t be hard.

Rogie made a new plugin for playing a prototype while editing it. Because the plugin accesses the file id, it has to be installed locally. (I usually just open a prototype in a new app window while working on it.)

Joey Banks with a tip on indicating component or layer status through naming.

Josh Cusick shares how the Design Systems team at Microsoft built, maintained, and set up for people to contribute the Figma UI kit for Teams Component Libraries (TCL). He covers structuring pages, naming things, aligning with code, design tokens, and version control.

Ridd shares his approach to organizing files in Figma.

Molly shares a few takeaways from recreating a responsive Asana dashboard in Figma.

The developer of the popular Mac app iStat Menus tested how various design tools utilize the hardware they’re running on. For Figma, GPU seems to be more important than CPU, while memory is not a big factor as usage is limited to 2GB per tab. Good to know if you’re getting a new Mac but not sure about the config.

Tom Lowry gives a walkthrough of some of the new commenting improvements and enhancements.

Ryhan Hassan, Product Designer at Figma, on comments redesign: ​“To help teams manage and incorporate feedback throughout the design process, we’re introducing updates to comments in Figma and FigJam. These changes are designed to encourage collaborators to share comments and understand how to give better feedback, while helping designers more easily act on the input they receive.” Also, see his Twitter thread on design details and Christa Simon’s thread on design research.

Fantastic redesign of comments — now the pins are visible by default and form clusters when you zoom out. They’ve also added search, sorting, reactions, and selecting an area to comment on. Show or hide pins with Shift-C.

Insert and retain the original resolution of big images, working around Figma’s limitation of 4,096 pixels during imports. Just last week, I had to add a few large screenshots to the project and ended up cutting them down manually in Pixelmator while thinking of building this plugin. Apparently, Yuan Qing Lim had the same idea a while ago!