It's a pity Dashboard died on the vine, in the early days it was a nice path for designers and tinkerers to get into making apps… another of the DIY paths going away.

…and don't forget it was the early testing ground for the original iPhone design aesthetic and the whole "delicious generation", so actually pretty influential in a lot of ways.

…and Figma does cost more for anything above 2 editors.

Not that I'm against Figma in any way, they've done some great stuff, and definitely have advantages over Sketch.

IMHO it'd really be great if our discussions could evolve beyond the "who did what first" partisan level, the increased competition in design tools is great for all of us, right?

As for using Figma, am I the only one who finds their UI a bit uncomfortable, and not as efficient as you might expect? Esp. coming from "native to the web" POV, e.g. super surprised they still don't offer decent text/object/layer search. Hopefully coming.

Sketch are definitely behind in collab so it's nice to hear they're working on that, and native Paddy and "stacks" are definitely needed ASAP.

It was Adobe that acquired and killed Fireworks and Freehand.

They're trying to simplify as much as possible, and find new(ish!) ways to do things, like the Repeat Grid, and auto-text styles.

I hope they're able to resist the clamour for traditional 'must haves' like Layers – and the 'busy work' they often cause. It'll be a hard balancing act, but if they can avoid too much baggage this could be a very lightweight, highly productive app.

It'll be interesting to compare Silver with Comet of course -- I'm finding Comet's (admittedly alpha-level) lightweight approach very productive and the new rendering engine really fast.

I actually like that they're seeing how far they can get without layers – this "no busy work" philosophy in other areas could see it even surpassing Sketch at their own game of simplicity + power.

Hopefully Sketch can ramp up addressing some of the longer term issues and keep up their momentum. Interesting times!

Pretty similar in concept to Apple's iAds and Microsoft's native ad proposal from some time ago, but drastically more reach.

An interesting comparison -- expressive native ad formats like this could be used for content/brand marketing like Snapchat Stories.

Certainly a subtle point, but your repositioned version has improved balance.