I miss the days of having a native desktop design app with a perpetual license.

What Figma achieved technically in the 2010s was amazing. Coded the app in C++ and then used WASM to deliver it as a multiplayer web app.

But now it's trying to be too many things. Why did they ever feel the need to add slides and this other stuff.

Their MCP is poor (sure, they'll improve it).

The app struggles with larger files and performance is sloppy.

And don't get me started trying to design data grid heavy apps.

And they could easily follow Adobe's lead. Enshittify and lock you out of your account whenever they feel it's necessary (remember what happened with Venezuelan Adobe users a few years ago?)

Either Penpot gets their act together and will become the opensource design canvas for open-weight AI models or we will see another open source solution that will fill this space.

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alwillis 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> I miss the days of having a native desktop design app with a perpetual license.

You can go that route with Affinity Designer [1], owned by Canva, who partnered with Anthropic on Claude Design [2]:

We’ve loved collaborating with Anthropic over the past couple of years and share a deep focus on making complex things simple. At Canva, our mission has always been to empower the world to design, and that means bringing Canva to wherever ideas begin. We’re excited to build on our collaboration with Claude, making it seamless for people to bring ideas and drafts from Claude Design into Canva, where they instantly become fully editable and collaborative designs ready to refine, share, and publish.

[1]: https://www.affinity.studio

[2]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs

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uxcolumbo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I have it, jumped on the affinity band wagon years ago after Adobe started their enshittification process.

After Canva bought Affinity, you now have to authenticate with your email from time to time when you launch the desktop app. Annoying and why do they do that?

Might go back to Affinity 2.

	▲	alwillis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Might go back to Affinity 2. Sure, but they stopped updating Affinity 2; at some point, it's going to stop working unless you never upgrade your operating system.