Figma’s killer feature that beat the competition was not components, codegen, shared libraries, etc, it was multiplayer. Figma should pivot to multiplayer AI. Not one has cracked this experience yet.
Despite the hype about AI coding tools, the dev experience feels like having dozens of 5 minute meetings all day long. Trading deep focus and stress for productivity. We are gonna see increased burnout and early retirement for senior engineers over the next few years akin to air traffic controllers.
I’ve had this experience too
Had a disheartening chat with other open source maintainers this week about dealing with the tsunami of AI slop. We discussed eliminating bounty incentives, closing open contribution, making test suites private. Tough times for OSS.
We need regime change on Punxsutawney Phil
@github.com Are you considering a product feature or usage guidelines where user-profiles need to self-identify as autonomous AI agents? Can you please! It's a mess for open source maintainers who wish to exclude low-quality, non-human contributions.
PixiJS v8.16.0 is out 🎉
- Return of Canvas 2D renderer
- Tagged text for inline styling
- Major SplitText improvements
- Cube textures, external textures, mip level rendering
- Broad engine stability updates
Plus a small preview for 3D 👀
pixijs.com/blog/8.16.0
Animated/Flash more than any other single piece of software allowed me, and others, to build technical skills and become an engineer. I do hope that creative tools continue to draw inspiration from it's successes and build innovative user experiences.
While LLMs and generative AI are the most exciting tool for creative folks to *create* software, I'm somewhat pessimistic that it will not be a tool to *learn* software development. I'm worried that many will treat it as a blackbox and be incentivized to acquire fundamental engineering skills.
As the content landscape has matured, the IDEs feel more specialized and don't have the same UX magic. Figma, Sketch, Unity, Cursor, VSCode, Origami, Protopie, Framer, Rive... the discipline overlap is much narrower and the opportunity for scaffolding into other disciplines is far less.
An artist could easily make an animation, then sprinkle in some timeline scripts, then creating external classes, then use standalone compiler. The more coding concepts you embraced, the cooler stuff you could build. Animate was a generational funnel for designers and animators to becoming engineers
Around 2016, I started development on a native Animate extension to export content to PixiJS using their custom document API. We used this to continue to create game and animated content. Still very proud of the work on this extension: github.com/pixijs-userl...
I joined the open source project @pixijs.com, which we started to use for projects at CloudKid. Many of the API design decisions we made were heavily inspired by AS3 and Flash. Ten years in, PixiJS is still going strong and we owe much of PixiJS's rise to the success (and decline) of Flash.
Even as our runtime transitioned from Flash to HTML5, we were still using Animate as a creative authoring tool and Flex/Air to produce apps. I created many animation workflow extensions for Animate, most notably cloudkid.studio/tools/keyfra...
When I started a company, CloudKid, in 2009 with my best friend Dave, we were still heavily invested in producing content using Animate, including apps, games, sites and animation production. This was *right* before Steve Jobs' letter deriding Flash: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought...
I started working professionally with Animate (then Flash) in 2005, when I started working as a Designer for Disney. This was the Club Penguin days. When I left that job 4 years later, I was engineering full-time writing AS3, using Flex SDK and building desktop tools with Adobe Air.
One of the most underrated and overlooked killer features of #AdobeAnimate was the ability to scaffold a design UX into an engineering UX. I have met MANY talented engineers around my age who learned software development because of Animate and ActionScript 3. 🧵
Where is Murray’s (aka Bald Eagle) happily ever after??? #strangerthings
Are anyone else’s Boomer parents a magnet for getting tricked by AI? Most of my conversations with them recently ultimately end with: “everything is fake, don’t trust anything you see or read.” What a menace to our society. How is this sustainable?
For sale: data center, never used
@figma.com The skew handle on gradients is not appearing correctly and changing visibility as you drag it. This seems like a bug. I'm on macOS 15.7 M1 Pro, desktop Figma app. Is this a known issue?
In my experience, one out of every 100 beginner contributors is someone that needs a little mentorship to be very successful. Most projects don’t attract a ton of popular attention and real human capital is extremely valuable. Beginner contributors are an investment.
Do you consider open source contribution as direct participation in social media or as an extension of a professional pursuit? I think that perspective matters.
Following up on the LLM docs post:
We just published a GPT assistant that’s wired into our official guides and docs.
Give it a try: chatgpt.com/g/g-681259d...
Feedback welcome!
Benny’s Rabbit Poop Removal. Call Benny Today
If you need work done, I gotta guy
@github.com Could you please add tags into the commits page UI? The GitHub Desktop app, for instance, shows this well in the History tab and it's super useful.
Looking to add marching ants into your project? Checkout this new v8 plugin @pixi/marquee-selection github.com/pixijs-userl...
