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over 5 years ago from Josh Dunsterville, Designer building community at Figma
"Anima Auto Layout" and "Paddy". Man, those two things need to be baked into Sketch/Figma real soon.
The real issue isn't waiting for those plugins to be converted to Figma features.
The point is that no one can add features to Figma except them. Sketch has innovated a lot through the years, even to compete with some of the plugins. I would miss the innovation.
Yeah, I had a call with them regarding their api like 6 months ago. We wanted to build tools on top of Figma for the actual creation of design, but they were more interested in integrations to third party software. We were wanting to build something like Craft, but they wanted things like export to Dropbox, etc..
Just curious because I haven't actually used those plugins but what specifically makes those plugins so valuable? From what I've read I'm pretty confident that most of what they do can be done natively in Figma using constraints and smartly using components but perhaps I'm missing something.
For example, with Paddy you can set the paddings of a button so when the label text changes the background would automatically updates its size, just like real CSS would. You can also set a persistent spacing between elements in a group so they are always say 8px apart. The combination of these two features makes for an extremely efficient workflow where you'll never have to nudge a single pixel every time you change the content. This is so powerful that it should really be built into one of these design tools.
How does paddy behave when it comes to exporting files to Zeplin? My only concern is there'd be weird sublayers that throw developers off when redlining.
Works just fine with Zeplin and other redlining tools. There's no need to have weird sublayers, since everything is done on the layer name. For things that don't have a colored background, I sometimes just add a background rectangle layer with no fill. This actually helps redlining because it shows the actual 'div' box around the element instead of what's only visible to the eye.
Damn, if you didn't name my four most-frequently used plugins! Would love to see Figma add these plugins/features to help persuade me to make the switch…
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Finally! Definitely going to help me switch to Figma. Waiting for these 4 sketch plugins to arrive on figma:
Congrats on this launch!