Comment by seanwilson
6 days ago
Hmm, feels more related to how big the imported assets and final exports are, and how fast + accurate previews are, rather than who does the export? If I'm dealing with GB size videos and image files, local is going to have performance and storage cost advantages so that's why local makes more sense for e.g. movie editors and high-end photoshop work? A lot of terminal based development work could be done via a web app without a problem for example with the big plus of sidestepping complex local dev setup but it becomes less attractive when real-time graphics are involved.
Figma files are relatively light so previews and exports are fast - you can't even import images that are more than a few MB.
There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?
Also remote solutions like Jump Desktop (https://jumpdesktop.com) are pretty popular in the media editing world, so folks are choosing to edit remotely, they just aren't using web apps to do so.
So I still think the unique combination that Figma has is that unskilled folks are viewing, commenting, and editing on the document along with designers themselves, using the same tool. And that's facilitated by the tool itself being relatively simple. It's a common workflow that we see with the office suite software that I mentioned.
> There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?
Maybe just a matter of time? I'm not familiar with all these domains, but I'm sure there's vendor lock-in, proprietary file formats, integrations/automations, plugin ecosystems, and general popularity/momentum (plus maybe lack of full GPU and other hardware support?) for certain tools that make it hard to switch and slows down competition. It wasn't that long ago that spreadsheet and word processor software being local only was the norm either.
Most of those areas I listed already have web apps, they just aren't popular (I'd argue because there just isn't much need for them). I've written about how shockingly quickly adoption usually happens when market opportunity presents itself https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...
In this case, `asm.js`, which was the original the core technology that made any of this possible, was released in 2013, which is ancient in this day and age.
It's normally very fast from technology to creation of the initial product to wide-spread adoption (typically about five years from release of the first version, per my blog post). So more likely if this does happen, it will require another core technology breakthrough, e.g., `asm.js` (now WebAssembly) isn't enough to facilitate it on its own.