Adobe, the creative business behemoth, acquired Figma for $20 billion. The move shocked the whole creative community, as Figma was one of the biggest rivals of Adobe, which the big enterprise could not beat. The startup which rose in popularity so quickly posed a big threat to the Creative Cloud offerings of the established player. Adobe XD did not come close in popularity, and you could succesfully imitate Illustrator’s functionality in the freemium browser-based tool.
Adobe did what any of the large companies can – if you can’t beat somebody, buy them out.
The Bottom Line
$20 billion is a sizeable price hike for Figma, which was recently priced at half that, when the company raised $200 million. The design giant has an interesting question to answer – now that it purchased Adobe XD’s competitor, what will it do with their own tool? Will they discontinue it? Will they merge the two somehow? Will they kill off Figma, making XD more like it? The question remains to be answered, but the history is not too kind for the browser-based tool.
Aviary used to be a popular photo editing suite on mobile systems. Adobe bought it in 2014, and it integrated it into the Creative Cloud family of products soon after. 4 years later, the company announced it is removing the downloads from the stores, and it ends support for the product.
Furthermore, users are not very happy about the purchase, to say the least:
This is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad. I just hate Adobe so much. The nightmare of their installer, the weird store with horrible designs popping up when you activate normal ui stuff, the difficulty in canceling a subscription, and the stasis in their product and ui. Oh and the sloppiness of Lightroom on mac with it's weird ui and that it didn't even import and manage photos well.
I've been so happy to have Adobe out of my life these last 10 years. I never even cared about the cost.
And figma has been so admirable, one of the best browser based apps. Always squeezing incredible performance out of the web with their crazy c++ engine. And their fast pace of delivering new features, often reworking ui just for the craft of it. It's been fun to just read the release notes.
https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...
Perhaps the silver lining will be the talent scattering, moving to and founding other companies, but for today this s[****].
The full Hacker News thread is here.
We will see what happens with Figma, though it’s reasonable to stay slightly pessimistic.
Next.js, the React-based full-stack framework received an update, in which the team has announced:
The Bottom Line
The fact that the new Image component, and the SWC minification are now stable are nice. The improved fast refresh and the TypeScript autoinstall are great as well, though the real feature we can’t wait to see are the new router, and the new layouts. They will be ultra-useful additions, that developers will be wise to use from day one. Read more about the new features here.
It is reasonable to expect the router update during the Next.js online conference.
Version 1.1 brings a lot of improvements.
If you need a refresher on what Fresh is, this video by Jack Harrington has got you covered
Astro, the beloved static-site generator has just reached version 1.3.
.svg){kind=small}
