According to the project maintainers, there can be difficulty in handing off projects from designers to developers because they are often using different tools and the vision of the project may get lost along the way. 

In Penpot, the interfaces that designers create get expressed as code so that developers can pick up right from where the designers left off, eliminating some of those struggles that are common to the hand off process. 

It features a web-based multiplayer mode that allows for real-time collaboration because multiple people can be working within the same design at once. There is also a whiteboard feature that allows designers and developers to come together to brainstorm, test ideas, and organize workshops. 

Designers can also save their design elements and components so that they can easily be reused, allowing for better consistency between projects. 

Other features include the ability to add custom fonts, unlimited teams and projects, a presentation mode for sharing ideas, and support for over 30 different languages. 

As of August 2024, the project has 31K stars on GitHub and has over 150 developers contributing to it. It is used by companies like Cisco, Mozilla, and NYU. 

It was created by Kaleidos, which was originally a consulting firm, but has since pivoted to fully support the development and growth of Penpot. 

Read about other recent Open-Source Projects of the Week:

• Dioptra
• Semantic Kernel’s Agent Framework
• Hoppscotch

The post Penpot – SD Times Open Source Project of the Week appeared first on SD Times.

“Developers have been able to build beautiful applications faster using our tools, because they don’t have to spend months or years building and maintaining UI controls like high-performance interactive data grids and data charts, scheduling views, and sophisticated Office ribbons,” said Jason Beres, senior vice president at Infragistics. “We expanded our focus to include designers because you can’t build the kind of experiences end users expect without a design process, or at least design tooling and a designer involved in the project.”

However, designers are not always available. Small businesses tend to lack designers because they can’t justify the expense. Large companies often have a UX team working in a Center of Excellence (COE). The COE is a central resource, UX resources are project based and tend not to be dedicated to a specific development team.

RELATED CONTENT: Improving UX outcomes is a team sport

Infragistics brings the power of design to developers and the power of codeless application development to designers so their organizations can deliver better UXs, faster. Indigo.Design allows visual and UX designers to prototype experiences, test them with users and automatically generate Angular code.

“User experience is a high priority now for competitive reasons,” said Beres. “If end users don’t like your application, there are always more compelling options a few clicks away. Our customers depend on us to give them the guidance tooling they need.”

Drive UX ROI faster

Indigo.Design is a unified platform for visual design, UX prototyping, code generation and app development. Designers have been using the product to create entire app experiences in Sketch. Now, they can skip the traditional hand-off to developers and let them generate application code directly from their design, automatically.

“Customers constantly tell us that user experience is a top priority, yet teams often lack resources they need. Management doesn’t want to spend the money because it doesn’t see an immediate return on UX investments,” said Beres. “We allow you to accelerate UX ROI because developers aren’t wasting time writing throw-away code that users haven’t tested.  Our tooling also helps design teams and UX COE’s set standards and guidelines that the development teams can follow.”

Japanese mid-level ERP system provider Super Stream used Infragistics UI components, tooling and design resources to improve its UX and the pace at which it can deliver new and improved experiences to market. The company also embedded Infragistics’ ReportsPlus to embed dashboards and analytics into its ERP product.

“They didn’t have a UX team or designers on projects, so they used our products and tooling to accelerate their delivery,” said Beres. “They were able to deliver a great experience their customers love three to four times faster.”

Visual design teams are generating lots of prototypes today.  With Indigo.Design, they can accelerate the transition from design concepts to finished products.  They are also more confident that customers won’t just use their applications, they’ll love the experience.

“If you’re looking for developer productivity that also produces great experiences for modern web or mobile apps and you want to leverage the skills of your design team in that process, as well as accelerate your time to market, Infragistics tooling can help,” said Beres. “End users have become so fickle as more of the world continues to be digitized that businesses are literally competing on user experience. We help level the playing field by bridging important gaps that have existed between design and development, and by providing tools that make delivering great user experiences faster and easier regardless of how many designers and developers you have or don’t have.”

Infragistics has what you need

Infragistics delivers tooling the way customers want it.  For example, .Net developers can choose Ultimate UI control suites designed specifically for Windows Forms, WPF, ASP.net and Xamarin. There are also the Ignite UI component suites for JavaScript, ASP.Net MVC, Angular and React, as well as the Indigo.Design platform which ties together visual designers, UX architects & developers, and the ReportsPlus SDK which includes embedded business intelligence and dashboards on any platform.  Infragistics Ultimate includes all the products.

“We remain dedicated to improving developer productivity, especially around modern web and mobile,” said Beres. “Including designers and design teams has become a key piece of our product strategy.”

Learn more at www.infragistics.com.

Content provided by SD Times and Infragistics

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Angular announced plans to bridge the gap between developers and designers in May with the introduction of Angular for Designers. Infragistics announced Indigo.Design in July to provide better collaboration throughout the software design process. This week, the Qt Company is announcing the release of Qt Design Studio 1.0, a UI design and development environment.

“We believe that collaboration between designers and developers in an effective workflow fosters and boosts product innovation and ultimately leads to a  better user experience,” Petref Saraci, product manager at the Qt Company, wrote in a blog post.

The Qt Design Studio has been built  to improve the collaboration between designers and developers by providing graphical views for designers and Qt Modeling Language code for developers. According to the company, this enables designers to leverage their Photoshop designs and skills. The company plans to support more graphical design tools in the future.

The main features include:

• Photoshop bridge to import graphics from Photoshop
• Timeline-based animations for writing animations without having to write code
• Qt live preview for running and previewing apps or UI directly on the desktop or devices

In addition, the company is providing how-to videos to guide users through features and capabilities as well as show how to design and develop a UI with the solution.

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“Designers put a lot of time into designing components and features for their products, however there often still remains a gap between a designer’s vision and a developer’s reality,” Blair Metcalf, UX engineer at Google, wrote in a post. “Designers are ready for a dynamic, data-driven way of working and the web is capable of delivering the tools they want.”

As part of the initiative, the UX engineer team is working on a WYSIWYG prototyping tool that will eventually give designers the ability to create prototypes without writing code. “Many articles have been written about the unresponsive nature of current design tools that lack real data; designers are not able to work in a medium that feels like their final product. Instead, designers are limited to creating static mockups that don’t convey experiences well and are often on their own if they want to build a more interactive prototype,” Metcalf wrote.

The team hopes this will help design and development teams communicate better. “[In] a world where a designer is able to assemble a page using the same components as a developer, they can now speak the same language,” Metcalf explained.

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Indigo Design Code Studio is comprised of the Infragistics Design System, Indigo Studio, and Code Generation and UI Components for Angular and Flutter.

The Infragistics Design System features a library of UI components, UI patterns, pre-defined screens, and complete app scenarios built using Sketch.

Indigo Studio is a graphical prototype tool that uses drag-and-drop to upload designs, add capabilities such as navigation and transitions between screens, and work with stakeholders and get feedback. It also allows user to perform usability studies with built-in video playback and analytics on studies.

Users will be able to create Angular or Flutter applications for Android and iOS using Indigo D2C Studio Visual Studio Code plug-in and UI components.

“We are thrilled to be at Google I/O today and announce our commitment to become a leading player in the Flutter ecosystem,” said Jason Beres, senior vice president of developer tools at Infragistics. “We share the Flutter team vision on providing designers and developers the tools they need to realize increased performance, productivity, and the ability to deliver a powerful UI.  With Indigo D2C Studio we are working hard to leverage the tools and frameworks designers and developers love the most, integrate the ability to collaborate on prototypes, and take the guesswork out of the asset hand-off and spec creation with code generation for Flutter and Angular apps.”

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“Apps that users love to use, developers love to build,” said Stephen Fluin, developer advocate for Angular. “But we have been leaving out designers and I think they are a critical part of building experiences that users love to use.”

Fluin defines designers as “individuals who focus more on the user interface and user experience.” The reason why the team is taking a broad definition to designers is because a lot of designers define themselves in different ways, use different tools and have a variety of different skills, so the team did not want to leave anyone out.

The problem today is that the standard development process involves a designer building something then throwing it to the developer to execute, and often times they don’t build what the designer intended, Fluin explained. In addition, there are a lot of different development tools and skills that designers need to learn in order to successfully share and collaborate with developers. “Users need experiences, they don’t need technology,” said Fluin.

Angular for Designers is meant to bridge this gap. “If we could find a better way for them to collaborate, we are going to save everyone time and produce better results,” Fluin said. The solution is still in the ideation phase and the team is only exploring certain approaches right now, but nothing is planned to be released yet.

The goals for the solution is to: 1. Make Angular useful for designers 2. Create more collaborative teams 3. Empower design system authors 4. Make it easier to build great experiences.

RELATED CONTENT: Angular 6 wants to be smaller, faster and easier-to-use

Some ways Angular thinks it can meet these goals is by providing solutions that don’t force designers to learn developer tools; providing more ergonomic file formats; creating a single HTML file; adding new commands that makes prototyping easier; providing best practices, getting started guides and focused instructions for designers; simplifying the process for designer to contribute; and making it easier for developers to use the design experience.

Fluin also revealed plans to release a prototyping tool that uses real components and enables developers to apply rules from the component library so that designers don’t create things that can’t happen in the real world. Google currently maintains a cloud-based prototyping tool called Cloud Kit that it uses internally. Eventually, the Angular team plans to provide an external version of that.

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According to the report, the bill would require IoT vendors to provide their internet-connected equipment to the government as a way to make sure products are “patchable and conform to industry secuirty standards.” The legislation was drafted with input from tech experts at both Harvard University and Atlantic Council.

“We’re trying to take the lightest touch possible,” Warner told Reuters in an interview. Reuters also reports that the new legislation includes “reasonable security recommendations,” said Ray O’Farrell, chief technology officer at cloud computing firm VMware.

More information can be found here.

Realm Academy launches for mobile development
Realm launched Realm Academy this week, a free repository of written, audio and video content and training on mobile development tools and methodologies. This spans across Apple iOS, Google Android, and other mobile platforms, and it is aimed at experienced developers looking to learn new skills and solutions like Kotlin, RxSwift, and MVVM.

“[Realm has] already curated and shared close to 1,000 pieces of content from across the mobile community, focusing on the tools that developers care about the most, and we will work closely with recognized mobile experts to build on this incredible library,” said CEO of Realm, Alexander Stigsen.

Additional benefits of Realm Academy include its Learning Paths, which are educational videos and how-tos for developers. It also includes blog posts, white papers, and more for developers to quickly improve their skills on new tools and solutions, said Realm.

HP and NVIDIA’s VR Backpack
HP and NVIDIA announced the new HP Z VR Backpack, powered by the NVIDIA Quadro P5200 GPU, which is a lightweight, 10 pound, wearable PC that allows professionals to move around in any VR environment. Now, designers, developers, and engineers have a “high-end” workstation right on their back, reports

“With the NVIDIA Quadro P5200 powering the HP ZVR Backpack, the wearable VR workstation is realized,” said Josh Peterson, vice president of product management for workstations, HP Inc. “Now our customers can smoothly interact with high-end workloads and complex simulations with optimal performance and the ultimate user experience.”

Facebook’s video chat device
Facebook is tackling a major hardware project, according to a Bloomberg Technology report. The social media and tech giant is working on a video chat device for the home, and this will be the first product coming out of its Building 8 lab, which is staffed with hardware veterans and led by former Google executive, Regina Dugan.

The device may be announced as soon as next spring’s F8 developer conference, according to Bloomberg’s report. The device is currently in the prototype phase, but it’s already being tested in people’s homes. Dugan said that the goal of Building 8 is to create and ship new consumer products that are social first, and make it easier to connect with friends and family.

More information can be found here.

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