My mind was blown with the "visual IntelliSense" demo.
Having a UI component library where you can get a visual preview of what the element looks like while you key up/down through autocomplete options seems drastic for development velocity.
What can't you do with VSCode these days? I hope we continue to see a trend of innovative IDE features like this.
A lot of these functions where already available a decade ago. The development environment for ActionScript 3 + Flex + Adobe Air was fairly good, and there was also a lot of tooling around live previews and going from a design to code and the other way around available.
It seems this kind of tooling had gone out of favor over the years, in exchange for only using code. It seems like there are some cycles in which people rethink how much a visual preview is worth to them.
I was around doing AS3 / Flex / Air in 2006-2007 era and agree, I can’t help but also feel what’s old is new again.
If I were to make a guess, IDEs are coming back into favor for a couple reasons (the balance of how much each contributes being debatable):
- VSCode, and to a lesser extent the Jetbrains suite of IDEs, are showing that you can have an IDE and it still be reasonably fast. That’s in stark difference to the old Eclipse days as one example.
- Developer machines continue to get faster and have more RAM, yet most of the dev tools ecosystem seems to poorly take advantage of that. Compare the memory and processor usage of Slack (which arguable has a simpler task) with VSCode, which both use the same underlying platform (Electron). By so many apps setting such a low bar, it further enhances the view that VSCode is fast.
- our codebases continue to grow in size, have yet more dependencies, and yet more moving parts. Things like code completion / doc bubbles / etc are becoming more important as there’s just to much bloat for an average developer to keep in their “active memory”
- similar to the above point, our languages keep evolving constantly adding new things, making it harder to stay on top of all the new functionality, but the modern breed of IDEs can help there in a number of ways.
- we have a had a big wave of new developers start working over the past 15 years and some of them had NIH for things from the past, and now has reinvented what existed before, in someways better, in some ways worse.
I can think of more possible factors, but this is an already long post and I’m sure the ones I posted already will get debated as is.
I think IDEs and REPLs never went out of style. They just got forgotten about for awhile while the cycle between making updates to code and seeing the results was super fast. There's no need for live components on a simple non-webpacked JS/HTML/CSS webpage. You just reload the page, or have the page reload automatically every second.
Now that Node and Webpack take absolutely forever (relatively speaking) to get your JS2020/React/Redux/Bootstrap/SCSS app recompiled after a modification, being able to write the correct thing once and not have to wait a minute to have confidence in it is hugely valuable. Get the REPL time down to a second, and IDEs aren't terribly valuable anymore.
I didn’t want to offend anyone in any particular ecosystem, but when I talked about bloat in codebases, that is definitively one of several I had in mind.
I assume they are talking about the preview of UI elements at around 0:36 min into the video. There is a completion dropdown menu where the currently selected element of the list is rendered in a preview window right next to it.
Nah, I'm running a cheap N5000 (1.10 GHz) with 4 GB of RAM at home and VScode runs well. At the end of the day, it's the extensions that might slow the editor down as they greatly vary in quality.
With only some Typescript/LESS/Node/Linting/Live Reload extensions, VSCode is sitting at 70 Mo right now. I think Microsoft did a great job with it. My machine can barely run Android Studio or Webstorm on the other hand, unless I turn off code inspection.
That's amazing. I've been trying to profile which extensions are causing my slowdowns but still not getting a satisfactory result. I think my ESLint/Vetur is re-checking all open files on every keystroke (not debounced) and it becomes slow after a few hours of the editor being open. But I can't really get it down to a specific extension.
Thanks for the tip! Seems like Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 and Rainbow Indentation doesn't play nicely with the Vim extension. Bracket Pair Colorizer 1 is fine though, but I don't have a replacement yet for Rainbow Indentation.
Are you running a browser with multiple tabs, just boggles my mind how that works with 4gb. Are you using a funky light weight window manager. I truly wish to know how you manage it.
Don't complain about things that already have obvious solutions.
A lot of programmers think investing in hardware is stupid, because they think "if it was just coded more efficiently, I wouldn't have to".
If my car can't pull a trailer that's too heavy, I can complain that the trailer is too heavy and spend way too much time hauling stuff. Or I can buy a car that's better suited for the job and do more work in one day.
That's a stupid analogy of course, because a machine with 32Gb of RAM often costs less than what you make in a week. Stop complaining, just deal with it.
Adobe has dominated the visual design software field for decades, but in recent years they missed the boat for UI/UX design and I would say that Sketch and Figma dominate 'mindshare' among designers for app design. Although Adobe XD doesn't share the same 'mindshare', the dominance of Adobe in the industry means that there is still interest in the product.
Will this Adobe XD update broaden the usage of the app? Only time will tell. It's nice to see alternatives to Adobe apps though.
It does appear that Adobe is in the unusual position of playing catch-up in this field for once. (Another example of Adobe catching-up is on the iPad where Procreate has leapt over Adobe to dominate the digital painting app space.)
The dilemma is that they wont't make XD maximally useful as a standalone tool because it then eats into their other offerings like Illustrator or Photoshop.
Figma for example is a more complete solution if that's the only design tool you gonna use, it has a good pen tool and even blend modes for images.
XD shines when used together with their other apps. Figma isn't much cheaper than a CC subscription when you also add services/tools for commercial fonts, mockups, video, stock graphics and 3D on top.
"The dilemma is that they wont't make XD maximally useful as a standalone tool because it then eats into their other offerings like Illustrator or Photoshop."
I can certainly believe this. For a long time, Illustrator only had the option to create a single artboard (page). I'm convinced it was partly due to the overlap with InDesign. If you wanted to create a short document or leaflet, Illustrator would be fine for the purpose - but obviously not if you could only export a single page. Users were clamouring for multiple pages/artboards and Adobe finally introduced the feature in Illustrator CS4 in 2008. (There were over 12 versions of Illustrator prior to this.)
One key thing that VSCode doesn't seem to have is an in-context REPL - what's the right term here? - that lets you run code in the same VM that the text editing stuff is running in, affecting the editor's state by executing the same routines that the editor uses to do things itself. You use this for anything you want, really, from just driving the text editor from code on an ad-hoc basis to writing new extensions interactively.
This really is the main thing that any competitor to Emacs needs to have, in my view, much more so than the prehistoric keybindings, devoted fanbase, wide range of addons, and nasty extension language. (VSCode has 3 out of 4 here anyway.) Without it, VSCode is much more just Visual Studio with Javascript instead of C++.
I know this is kind of a joke but when I'm doing system admin related things it is basically my OS GUI. Instead of using any of my regular shells like cmd/PS/WSL/Cygwin I use vscode remote to a local Linux VM and do everything using the shell and editor within my VM home directory.
I won't be buying any Adobe products any more. From their extremely high prices, to forced subscriptions/cloud only products to their terrible security track record.
Thankfully there are now many cheaper and better alternatives to buy from.
Whenever people say this I ask about After Effects. I have yet to find a FOSS or cheaper substitute. Many people have suggestions for Premiere Pro replacements, but not After Effects.
Hands down, Blender. See Ian Hubert’s channel[0] for samples of what can be achieved with Blender by a tiny team.
His examples tend to be specific to VFX, but Blender is quite general-purpose as far as motion design goes with an NLE, support for the familiar “expressions” paradigm, and so on.
I use Blender and Ian Hubert’s recent work is what got me into it. It’s an excellent tool when it comes to the kind of motion-tracked work he does (and which I hope to get into) but for quickly cutting together motion graphics I have not found it to be as handy.
If you want to do 2D motion graphics, there is no real rival for After Effects (AE). A new motion and animation app called Cavalry recently launched but it's far too early to see if it can rival AE. It also uses an online subscription model (https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/).
Very cool. Adobe stock has nearly doubled in the past 12 months and they've been on an upward trajectory for the past 5 years.
Once Adobe realized they're competing with piracy the same way the music industry was, oops, all of a sudden there are profits to be made from simply charging a fair price.
I used Adobe products, almost all of them, for over 20 years and I felt so burned by their business model that I don't even want it for free at this point. Also, Fireworks was the best mockup tool they had and instead of improving/evolving it they killed it.
I was a beta tester for Fireworks for one version. It was a pure joy to work with. It was the best web design/interface design software for years.
And yes, another reason I have lost faith in Adobe as a company is them bailing on Fireworks. Maybe because it was a Macromedia product originally. It seems every Macromedia product has been abandoned/neglected by Adobe.
XD is pretty much a flop in the market. Imagine a world where photoshop or Illustrator showed up late and were actually not very successful against competition. It’s a not-bad product, it’s just behind by one or two steps at things like plugins verses Sketch or Figma. Sure Figma isn’t native but it is very performant regardless and the portability of just piping a browser open anywhere is LOVED by clients.
Sketch is sketch. They invented this market and everything is basic a rip on it. Mac only, but that’s generally UX designers anyways.
It is very notable that XD is used by very few major companies. The industry leading firms overwhelmingly use Sketch or Figma or both.
That is very important in development or plugins. There is just so, much, more.
Macs designers are snowflakes on a world where Apple computers accounts for 10% of world market. Designers working on 90% of the rest of the world also need their tools.
Sketch did not invent anything, similar tools were already available on the 90's.
If industry you mean Web designers using Macs around Silicon Valley coffee shops then maybe you're right.
Having freelanced, contracted and worked at graphic design studios, ad agencies, font foundries, charities, finance companies, publishing companies and in government in the UK, I can safely say I've never seen any design departments use Windows as standard. None of these were in Silicon Valley and I've never worked in a coffee shop. This is also coming from someone who was almost religiously anti-Apple for many years.
You can certainly do good design on Windows, but there's no chance 90% of professional UI designers here are using Windows. And for user interface design Sketch is absolutelythe standard these days. I'd love to hear what similar tools were available in the 90s.
Affinity Designer is cross-platform (Mac and Windows) and is cheaper than Adobe (and not based on an online subscription) but it's not focused wholly on UI design. It doesn't match XD feature-by-feature but it can be used for UI app design. It has no prototyping features and is unlikely to have such a feature in the future.
It does have features like symbols that are essential for any UI design app (a symbol is a visual component that can be repeated throughout a design; editing one instance updates all instances).
However, the Affinity Designer audience skews more towards illustration and my impression is it isn't used as much for UI design even though it has very capable tools to accomplish this. This means fewer tutorials and a small community using it solely for UI design.
Here's an example tutorial on creating a mobile app UI using Affinity Design that shows what can be done in the app:
Adobe Fonts integration is useful for marketing pages. In Figma you only get Google fonts, but that's what everybody is using with site builders, Canva etc.
What's also nice is that you can create color themes in their Color/Kuler web app and then have those themes available to pick from within XD, or that you can open and work on images and scenes in Photoshop or Dimension (their V-Ray based 3D app which is cool for Hero scenes).
Best use both, Figma is better for web apps (XD doesn't even have inset shadows for forms), and XD is a bit better for landing and marketing pages, especially if you use their other tools.
Hi, Dylan (Figma CEO) here. You can use local fonts in Figma via a local daemon helper, our native app or by adding the font to a shared library on our Org Plan. (Assuming you have an appropriate license for the font.)
We're also hopeful browsers will expose an API for accessing a list of local fonts / font metrics with the user's permission. (It's a fingerprinting issue to expose this info without the user opting in which is why browsers haven't built something like this in past.) This is gaining traction on the Chrome team, which is really exciting! https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=535764...
Hey, thanks for replying. I'm aware of local fonts, but you first have to get them onto your system, which is additional friction. With CC I can just browse their catalog and enable or disable what I want.
Have you thought about integrations with popular (among typographers) services like Fontstand, or smaller ones like Fontown? This could be a gamer changer. I really want Figma to become a real alternative to Adobe, not only for UI stuff!
Adobe Fonts is near the top reason I currently am pushing people I work closely with away from Adobe.
Adobe's font control is simply dystopian. Many hours wasted debugging why a font was having issues _only_ in Adobe products, but not in other software (like Word).
Did you know Adobe Creative Cloud also an electron app? Not to mention dozen of other adobe system service will be installed whether you like it or not
Same with me and Figma. I was sent Sketch files and I wanted to use them. Myself I prefer paper (or something basic like the Concepts app on iPad) when sketching UIs.
I have no idea what your priorities are, so it's hard to guess. XD doesn't support Linux either. Apparently https://icons8.com/lunacy runs on Windows and can import and export to Sketch.
I'm pretty much completely invested in the Adobe ecosystem. I don't find it expensive at all for how much I get out of it, but if there's a better option than Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign I'd love to hear about it.
I must say I fail to understand these products (Figma, XD,...) what is the difference between them and illustrator? how does it help prototype anything? You could just draw rectangle vectors or import images in Illustrator (or Photoshop). So what do these applications add to the formers? what do they do different? FYI I tried XD a bit.
Short version: Illustrator is a tool focusing on vector graphics. Figma is a tool that focuses on collaborative interface creation. Both of them are good in general, but depending on your needs, one could be better at that.
If you work in a large company where you need to maintain Design Systems and you frequently collaborate across teams (think different OSes), Figma would be more helpful for everyone. Especially because it has specific features to make that work good.
While if you're a lone designer doing design for physical products, you're probably better off with battle-tested Illustrator that has a lot more functionality around manipulating vectors.
In the end, it all depends on what you're doing. They have different use cases they want to cater to the best.
Sketch, Figma, and XD all make it quick to do the most basic prototyping: click hot spot to go to a different screen. They are much more focused on visual design than prototyping.
Looking into architecture of VSCode is one of my TODO tasks, that my 8-month daugter is actively preventing of doing.
The extensibility and things that VSCode allows is something. I remember the hearing about pain of developing Visual Studio addons. Eclipse was an anti-example of useful extensibility.
VSCode in relatively short period became de-facto leader IDE due to it's features and extensibility options.
> Eclipse was an anti-example of useful extensibility.
Eclipse is a fairly extensible IDE, with workbenches, it's just a terrible text editor. VSCode is a good text editor first and foremost. I saw a lot of complex enterprise projects using Eclipse and most of them ultimately were terrible to use because Eclipse didn't get the basics.
VSCode is rather easy to extend, since it uses JS and Web technologies.
- Microsoft making software for Linux? Huh? Is this an experiment? How long are they going to support it?
- It doesn't look anything like Visual Studio. Was this a bunch of rogue Visual Studio programmers that ditched their Visual J#.NET stuff and decided to call a fancy text editor Visual Studio?
Earlier this year I read an article [1] that spelled out some of the history of how vscode came to pass. I was surprised by how good the electron-based editor was, and early on (2016) it immediately replaced sublime text for me, before later on replacing practically all other ides.
> - Microsoft making software for Linux? Huh? Is this an experiment? How long are they going to support it?
Microsoft goes where the money is. They want developers to target their platform(s), and native Windows applications are a dying breed, everything is moving to the web/cloud, which is where Azure - and let's not forget Github - comes to play.
A ton of the development targeting the web had moved to Mac, the same time they completely missed the mobile app train, which meant they effectively lost an entire generation of new developers, not familiar with MS or even wary of them.
Introducing better and free developer tools on every single platform under the Microsoft branding introduces many developers to them again, with a positive impression. Which suddenly opens doors for Azure. It's the same reason they now have WSL2 on Windows running a real, heavily customized kernel. They want developers to feel comfortable using Microsoft, so Azure has a better chance. A developer having a good experience with "Microsoft" VSCode and coding in it daily won't be shouting "M$ SUCKS! Azure sucks!" as quickly, and that's where it starts.
And you see a big push of MS in the enterprise world of moving clients to Azure, and they don't care what platform you're using. If you're big enough, they gladly send a bunch of engineers to introduce your developers and infra guys to Azure, and they don't care if you run Windows, Mac or Linux, all their tools surrounding this are all cross-platform. At a client of mine's R&D department, this happened while I was there, and they didn't care that 3/4 of the tech people there were using Macs. Their guy who came in to introduce k8s on Azure even had a Mac a big Linux penguin sticker over the Apple logo, surrounded with various stickers of cloud-targeted opensource software. When I asked him about that, he responded with something like "well, they don't care, although I probably shouldn't add RedHat sticker".
So as long as "the cloud", which Linux dominates, makes Microsoft money, they don't care. And given the situation we're in, I doubt they'll ever be in a dominant position there to allow them abusing their power like they did on the PC desktop market in the 90's and 2000's.
I don’t know much of the architecture of VSCode but I was under the impression that Sublime and after that Atom were the ones doing most of the inventing and that Microsoft mostly copied it and did a faster and more stable implementation?
It drives me nuts when videos don't use youtube and have video players that don't support playback speed. I can speed up video 2x or even 4x and still keep up with a lot of these videos - that's how slow they talk.
Also, I don't understand why most of that needed to be done in VsCode. Surely they could've done the setup and asset export in the XD app that then also generated snippets for easy access in vscode. Instead, they're setting up all that meta data and complex workflows in a vscode extension.
Not only is that unnecessary, it's extremely annoying. Putting aside the additional bloat that has to go through electron, just debugging performance issues alone would be a PITA.
"Hacker News" is millions of different people every month. It seems at least some of them think differently from one another (otherwise how are people discussing and debating?). You're responding to one comment, by one person, and the comment is currently downvoted.
As usual with these things probably both a real thing and a hype buzzword. From what I've gathered it's about more efficiently scaling design work and integrating it with other parts of the business, e.g. here making design elements/components directly available to developers.
No idea what you're talking about, Intellij family is light years ahead of competition. It will take decades of them stagnating, and their competition moving really fast, to become uncompetitive.
Local history. Diff tool. Refactoring. Smart completions. And it just works out of the box, without extensions that may work or not, depending on how the maintainer finds time for updating.
vscode has all of those except for local history. You can argue that intelij does it better but that just a subjective opinion. Even when it's true that is just doing things slightly better, in no way "light year ahead", with a major downsize of being a jvm resource hog. Even electron apps perform better. I've never had to wait for vscode running index on a project.
Vscode is actually "light year ahead" across the board with newer/niche languages like rust or ocaml. They invented LSP which makes supporting new languages way easier without compromising intelligence.
Nsonha your point is right about vscode being better for niche languages.
Now if you use a mainstream programming language, intellij is light years away and not realizing it is proof of ignorance. It would be too long to list all of what intellij has to offer feature wise. The insanely huge amount of static analysis for improving your code quality is a sufficient example.
The VCS integration, the semantic highlighting, all the kind of hints, of visualization, their better autocompletion, refactorings and so on.
I extensively used vscode before and intellij changed my life, it make programming better and easier.
To show you the order of magnitude difference: let's compare the commits count:
Vscode has 72000 commits.
Intellij community edition has 295000 commits
Now realize that intellij ultimate edition probably has gotten twice that amount of human resources.
The performance is the worth it downside, and it is improving at each release, I'm on early adopter versions (which are free btw with premium features) + use prebuilt indexes and I can finally begin to say that most of the time idea feel fast (on a 4 years old ThinkPad)
I do use intellij just in a limited way, just don't see it sorry. "VCS integration" & "semantic highlighting" are just basic stuff eveyone has so idk why you bring those up. I rarely use any VCS integration other than diff and merge so even if there is none at all I'm fine with cli. However vscode has a very powerful 3rd party extension for git (git lenses) that has more features than intelij built-in, and the built-in support for github is built by the github team themselves so that's worth something.
"all the kind of hints": I don't think this is the job of an IDE, this is something that linters do very well and I trust them more than I trust a software that tries to do all things under the sun. Take python for example, vscode has support for 8 or so popular linters and will populate useful hints if you intstall one or even many of them. So you have both power and choices.
It may have better autocomplete for some language (I doubt typescript) or refactoring but those are things I don't really care about that much. I've used those in kotlin & scala, their support seem nice but the hints and refactoring didn't blow my mind or anything.
IntelliJ have years of providing value to Visual Studio through Resharper, and now have Rider which is miles ahead of VS, itself very far ahead from VS Code. MS could win for some workflow thanks to the extensions, but this come at the cost of stability. About half of the one I tried didn’t worked properly.
IMO, visual studio code, even with Python plugins can't hold a candle to PyCharm, and the vs-code of sql tools (data studio or whatever it's called), is terrible compared to DataGrip.
I pretty much only use vs code for Rust and random text editing, and even then that's mostly using Rust Analyzer, so I could just as happily use Sublime.
Having a UI component library where you can get a visual preview of what the element looks like while you key up/down through autocomplete options seems drastic for development velocity.
What can't you do with VSCode these days? I hope we continue to see a trend of innovative IDE features like this.
It seems this kind of tooling had gone out of favor over the years, in exchange for only using code. It seems like there are some cycles in which people rethink how much a visual preview is worth to them.
If I were to make a guess, IDEs are coming back into favor for a couple reasons (the balance of how much each contributes being debatable):
- VSCode, and to a lesser extent the Jetbrains suite of IDEs, are showing that you can have an IDE and it still be reasonably fast. That’s in stark difference to the old Eclipse days as one example.
- Developer machines continue to get faster and have more RAM, yet most of the dev tools ecosystem seems to poorly take advantage of that. Compare the memory and processor usage of Slack (which arguable has a simpler task) with VSCode, which both use the same underlying platform (Electron). By so many apps setting such a low bar, it further enhances the view that VSCode is fast.
- our codebases continue to grow in size, have yet more dependencies, and yet more moving parts. Things like code completion / doc bubbles / etc are becoming more important as there’s just to much bloat for an average developer to keep in their “active memory”
- similar to the above point, our languages keep evolving constantly adding new things, making it harder to stay on top of all the new functionality, but the modern breed of IDEs can help there in a number of ways.
- we have a had a big wave of new developers start working over the past 15 years and some of them had NIH for things from the past, and now has reinvented what existed before, in someways better, in some ways worse.
I can think of more possible factors, but this is an already long post and I’m sure the ones I posted already will get debated as is.
Now that Node and Webpack take absolutely forever (relatively speaking) to get your JS2020/React/Redux/Bootstrap/SCSS app recompiled after a modification, being able to write the correct thing once and not have to wait a minute to have confidence in it is hugely valuable. Get the REPL time down to a second, and IDEs aren't terribly valuable anymore.
I didn't see that. Was that on the VSCode extension page?
Run it on a machine with less than 8GB of RAM.
With only some Typescript/LESS/Node/Linting/Live Reload extensions, VSCode is sitting at 70 Mo right now. I think Microsoft did a great job with it. My machine can barely run Android Studio or Webstorm on the other hand, unless I turn off code inspection.
A lot of programmers think investing in hardware is stupid, because they think "if it was just coded more efficiently, I wouldn't have to".
If my car can't pull a trailer that's too heavy, I can complain that the trailer is too heavy and spend way too much time hauling stuff. Or I can buy a car that's better suited for the job and do more work in one day.
That's a stupid analogy of course, because a machine with 32Gb of RAM often costs less than what you make in a week. Stop complaining, just deal with it.
Will this Adobe XD update broaden the usage of the app? Only time will tell. It's nice to see alternatives to Adobe apps though.
It does appear that Adobe is in the unusual position of playing catch-up in this field for once. (Another example of Adobe catching-up is on the iPad where Procreate has leapt over Adobe to dominate the digital painting app space.)
Figma for example is a more complete solution if that's the only design tool you gonna use, it has a good pen tool and even blend modes for images.
XD shines when used together with their other apps. Figma isn't much cheaper than a CC subscription when you also add services/tools for commercial fonts, mockups, video, stock graphics and 3D on top.
I can certainly believe this. For a long time, Illustrator only had the option to create a single artboard (page). I'm convinced it was partly due to the overlap with InDesign. If you wanted to create a short document or leaflet, Illustrator would be fine for the purpose - but obviously not if you could only export a single page. Users were clamouring for multiple pages/artboards and Adobe finally introduced the feature in Illustrator CS4 in 2008. (There were over 12 versions of Illustrator prior to this.)
This really is the main thing that any competitor to Emacs needs to have, in my view, much more so than the prehistoric keybindings, devoted fanbase, wide range of addons, and nasty extension language. (VSCode has 3 out of 4 here anyway.) Without it, VSCode is much more just Visual Studio with Javascript instead of C++.
[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_50#_webview-views
Thankfully there are now many cheaper and better alternatives to buy from.
His examples tend to be specific to VFX, but Blender is quite general-purpose as far as motion design goes with an NLE, support for the familiar “expressions” paradigm, and so on.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI
I mean, can you code procedural FX with Python in After Effects? You can in Blender. And it's free.
2.90 is shockingly good.
For really simple things you can also use Hitfilm Pro
There is also https://natrongithub.github.io/ but I haven't personally tried it
Once Adobe realized they're competing with piracy the same way the music industry was, oops, all of a sudden there are profits to be made from simply charging a fair price.
Who woulda thunk it.
They get more money out of us, for a lesser product, that we have even less control of.
And yes, another reason I have lost faith in Adobe as a company is them bailing on Fireworks. Maybe because it was a Macromedia product originally. It seems every Macromedia product has been abandoned/neglected by Adobe.
Sketch is sketch. They invented this market and everything is basic a rip on it. Mac only, but that’s generally UX designers anyways.
It is very notable that XD is used by very few major companies. The industry leading firms overwhelmingly use Sketch or Figma or both.
That is very important in development or plugins. There is just so, much, more.
Sketch did not invent anything, similar tools were already available on the 90's.
If industry you mean Web designers using Macs around Silicon Valley coffee shops then maybe you're right.
You can certainly do good design on Windows, but there's no chance 90% of professional UI designers here are using Windows. And for user interface design Sketch is absolutelythe standard these days. I'd love to hear what similar tools were available in the 90s.
As for the 90's examples, I am a bit far away from my Computer Shopper UK edition to go dig out names.
This is like saying Facebook didn't invent anything because it came after Friendster.
It does have features like symbols that are essential for any UI design app (a symbol is a visual component that can be repeated throughout a design; editing one instance updates all instances).
However, the Affinity Designer audience skews more towards illustration and my impression is it isn't used as much for UI design even though it has very capable tools to accomplish this. This means fewer tutorials and a small community using it solely for UI design.
Here's an example tutorial on creating a mobile app UI using Affinity Design that shows what can be done in the app:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgaRAkohwMU
But...you can use PowerPoint or Keynote for creating simple clickable prototypes that can be very effective. For example: https://keynotopia.com/
What's also nice is that you can create color themes in their Color/Kuler web app and then have those themes available to pick from within XD, or that you can open and work on images and scenes in Photoshop or Dimension (their V-Ray based 3D app which is cool for Hero scenes).
Best use both, Figma is better for web apps (XD doesn't even have inset shadows for forms), and XD is a bit better for landing and marketing pages, especially if you use their other tools.
We're also hopeful browsers will expose an API for accessing a list of local fonts / font metrics with the user's permission. (It's a fingerprinting issue to expose this info without the user opting in which is why browsers haven't built something like this in past.) This is gaining traction on the Chrome team, which is really exciting! https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=535764...
https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956894-Use-Lo...
https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956774-Manage...
Have you thought about integrations with popular (among typographers) services like Fontstand, or smaller ones like Fontown? This could be a gamer changer. I really want Figma to become a real alternative to Adobe, not only for UI stuff!
Adobe's font control is simply dystopian. Many hours wasted debugging why a font was having issues _only_ in Adobe products, but not in other software (like Word).
I found Figma quite well-engineered, though I’ve only used it in its website incarnation.
I'm unsure how pricing compares.
Figma doesn't support the design capabilities for native app design, so no real alternative.
Where is then the alternative?
Figma of course runs in a browser so works fine on all, and there is a Mobile UI toolkit for it: https://www.figma.com/templates/mobile-ui-kit/
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/04/sketch-figma-adobe-...
https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/figma-vs-sketch-vs-adobe-xd/
But maybe what you need is... Adobe XD? I personally quite like it.
Axure RP? https://www.axure.com/
If you work in a large company where you need to maintain Design Systems and you frequently collaborate across teams (think different OSes), Figma would be more helpful for everyone. Especially because it has specific features to make that work good.
While if you're a lone designer doing design for physical products, you're probably better off with battle-tested Illustrator that has a lot more functionality around manipulating vectors.
In the end, it all depends on what you're doing. They have different use cases they want to cater to the best.
Sketch, Figma, and XD all make it quick to do the most basic prototyping: click hot spot to go to a different screen. They are much more focused on visual design than prototyping.
The extensibility and things that VSCode allows is something. I remember the hearing about pain of developing Visual Studio addons. Eclipse was an anti-example of useful extensibility.
VSCode in relatively short period became de-facto leader IDE due to it's features and extensibility options.
Eclipse is a fairly extensible IDE, with workbenches, it's just a terrible text editor. VSCode is a good text editor first and foremost. I saw a lot of complex enterprise projects using Eclipse and most of them ultimately were terrible to use because Eclipse didn't get the basics.
VSCode is rather easy to extend, since it uses JS and Web technologies.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview
- Microsoft making software for Linux? Huh? Is this an experiment? How long are they going to support it?
- It doesn't look anything like Visual Studio. Was this a bunch of rogue Visual Studio programmers that ditched their Visual J#.NET stuff and decided to call a fancy text editor Visual Studio?
VSCodium [0] is a fork of VS Code without Microsoft telemetry and branding.
If Microsoft decided to stop supporting VS Code, I think the development community would quickly pivot to VSCodium and pick up from there.
[0] https://vscodium.com/
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-vs-code-turns-5-how-...
Microsoft goes where the money is. They want developers to target their platform(s), and native Windows applications are a dying breed, everything is moving to the web/cloud, which is where Azure - and let's not forget Github - comes to play.
A ton of the development targeting the web had moved to Mac, the same time they completely missed the mobile app train, which meant they effectively lost an entire generation of new developers, not familiar with MS or even wary of them.
Introducing better and free developer tools on every single platform under the Microsoft branding introduces many developers to them again, with a positive impression. Which suddenly opens doors for Azure. It's the same reason they now have WSL2 on Windows running a real, heavily customized kernel. They want developers to feel comfortable using Microsoft, so Azure has a better chance. A developer having a good experience with "Microsoft" VSCode and coding in it daily won't be shouting "M$ SUCKS! Azure sucks!" as quickly, and that's where it starts.
And you see a big push of MS in the enterprise world of moving clients to Azure, and they don't care what platform you're using. If you're big enough, they gladly send a bunch of engineers to introduce your developers and infra guys to Azure, and they don't care if you run Windows, Mac or Linux, all their tools surrounding this are all cross-platform. At a client of mine's R&D department, this happened while I was there, and they didn't care that 3/4 of the tech people there were using Macs. Their guy who came in to introduce k8s on Azure even had a Mac a big Linux penguin sticker over the Apple logo, surrounded with various stickers of cloud-targeted opensource software. When I asked him about that, he responded with something like "well, they don't care, although I probably shouldn't add RedHat sticker".
So as long as "the cloud", which Linux dominates, makes Microsoft money, they don't care. And given the situation we're in, I doubt they'll ever be in a dominant position there to allow them abusing their power like they did on the PC desktop market in the 90's and 2000's.
Also, I don't understand why most of that needed to be done in VsCode. Surely they could've done the setup and asset export in the XD app that then also generated snippets for easy access in vscode. Instead, they're setting up all that meta data and complex workflows in a vscode extension.
Not only is that unnecessary, it's extremely annoying. Putting aside the additional bloat that has to go through electron, just debugging performance issues alone would be a PITA.
I can perhaps sympathize with the playback speed complaint, but I'm quite glad that not all video content on the web lives on a single service.
Agree on playback speed though.
Thankfully the other videos were better.
But I’m preparing to migrate. Now that MS has set their focus, I just don’t think IntelliJ tools can compete.
It’s going to be like trying to sell a browser.
Vscode is actually "light year ahead" across the board with newer/niche languages like rust or ocaml. They invented LSP which makes supporting new languages way easier without compromising intelligence.
Now if you use a mainstream programming language, intellij is light years away and not realizing it is proof of ignorance. It would be too long to list all of what intellij has to offer feature wise. The insanely huge amount of static analysis for improving your code quality is a sufficient example. The VCS integration, the semantic highlighting, all the kind of hints, of visualization, their better autocompletion, refactorings and so on. I extensively used vscode before and intellij changed my life, it make programming better and easier. To show you the order of magnitude difference: let's compare the commits count: Vscode has 72000 commits. Intellij community edition has 295000 commits Now realize that intellij ultimate edition probably has gotten twice that amount of human resources.
The performance is the worth it downside, and it is improving at each release, I'm on early adopter versions (which are free btw with premium features) + use prebuilt indexes and I can finally begin to say that most of the time idea feel fast (on a 4 years old ThinkPad)
"all the kind of hints": I don't think this is the job of an IDE, this is something that linters do very well and I trust them more than I trust a software that tries to do all things under the sun. Take python for example, vscode has support for 8 or so popular linters and will populate useful hints if you intstall one or even many of them. So you have both power and choices.
It may have better autocomplete for some language (I doubt typescript) or refactoring but those are things I don't really care about that much. I've used those in kotlin & scala, their support seem nice but the hints and refactoring didn't blow my mind or anything.
This. Maintaining a usable work environment in VSCode is just too time consuming.
I pretty much only use vs code for Rust and random text editing, and even then that's mostly using Rust Analyzer, so I could just as happily use Sublime.