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Adobe announced they were buying Figma two weeks ago, and most of the reactions I’ve seen about it since then were pretty negative.

Now it sounds like designers (and developers) are turning to an open source Figma competitor called Penpot.

From TechCrunch:

Even before the Adobe-Figma news hit, Penpot had been making a name for itself. Launched a year ago, the startup has seen tens of thousands of downloads and 15,000 “stars” on GitHub. The 10,000 companies among its active users include Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Tencent, ByteDance and Mozilla.

Before September 15, Penpot’s CEO and co-founder Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz said that sign-ups were growing at around 40% per month: after Adobe’s news, that figure ballooned to 5,600%, and has stayed consistent since then. On-premise deployments have also grown 400%.

I’m happy about this part. There definitely needs to be competition in apps/services like these.

But TechCrunch also reported:

The company, based out of Madrid, has picked up $8 million in a round led by Decibel out of the U.S., with participation also from Athos and, significantly, several individuals notable for their roles in creative and developer ecosystems.

I’m not so happy about this part.

I like to see smaller organizations get the money they need to succeed, but at what cost? Why is it so common for businesses to leave the important part (revenue) to the very end and then accept financing that is guaranteed to push them to make decisions they wouldn’t have otherwise? Like, you know, selling to a bigger company for a billion dollar exit for example.

More about this on Mastodon (including responses from the Penpot CEO).

Alex Heath:

Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.

This actually makes a lot of sense for them. If you’re gonna be a conglomerate (by buying up or cloning the features of any company that is in any way related to or a threat to you) then at least be clear about it. I’m guessing Mark Zuckerberg hopes this might also:

• Allow him to more effectively continue hiding from the consequences of his actions
• Make him a harder target for government investigation/action
• Put some distance between him and the tarnished Facebook name
• Position him as the CEO and leader of the entire “metaverse” he’s trying to build

Vlad Savov from Bloomberg:

The report that Facebook Inc. plans to change its corporate name prompted a flurry of online speculation as industry followers rushed to register their guesses.

[…]

“Meta” is another contender put forward by, among others, Samidh Chakrabarti, the company’s former civic integrity chief. The web address meta.com currently redirects to meta.org, the home of a biomedical research discovery tool developed under the stewardship of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-founded by the Facebook CEO. That suggests Zuckerberg has a head start on any other contender looking to secure the ultimate name for a metaverse firm.

I’m seeing a lot of people speculate that Meta is the new name. I’ve also seen either Horizon, which is the name of one of their VR projects, or just FB. Either way, I’m hoping this changes nothing and the company ends up being split into parts and the executives made responsible for the damage they’ve caused.

I’m watching the last season of The Expanse and still really into it. But I can’t help but feel sad every time I think about how short the season is. I really want more sci-fi like this.

Richard Lawler from The Verge reporting on OnlyFans' latest moves:

In an abrupt tweet, video and image sharing site OnlyFans announced a reversal of the shocker announcement that it would ban sexually explicit content. In a statement to The Verge, a spokesperson said “The proposed October 1st, 2021 changes are no longer required due to banking partners’ assurances that OnlyFans can support all genres of creators.”

They announced they were banning sexually explicit content on Friday. Here we are a few days later and they’ve already completely reversed the decision. How are any of the people who relied on the service ever going to trust it again after this?

Frontier Development just announced that they aren’t working on console releases for Elite Dangerous anymore:

Over the last several months, we have been wrestling with the best way to move forward, and it is with a heavy heart we have decided to cancel all console development. We need to be able to move forward with the story of the game, and in order for us to do this we need to focus on a single codebase. Elite Dangerous will continue on console as it is now together with critical updates, but we will focus on new content updates on PC on the post-Odyssey codebase.

I bought Elite Dangerous on PS4 in 2018. There was a lot that I liked about it (like exploring a real scale version of the entire Milky Way galaxy), and a lot I didn’t (like the constant grind to get anything good in the game). I played it pretty consistently on console until I bought it on PC about a year afterwards.

I had been playing it on and off since then, and was pretty interested when I heard about the Odyssey update (that’s the one where you can finally get out of your ship and shoot things on foot). I got access to the “alpha” in March last year, which seemed like pretty much the same version as what we got in the real release a few months later.

Like a lot of people on the Frontier forums and on reddit, I was pretty disappointed with the Odyssey release. The game was already too buggy, and this update just added more things that were also too buggy. But I was assuming Frontier would eventually start making some progress fixing things up and at least get the console release done.

I uninstalled the game a few months ago and I figured I would download it again when it seemed like it was in better shape, but it doesn’t feel like there’s much of a point now. The state of the game isn’t great and it doesn’t really sound like it’ll ever get much better.

Reactions:

• Frontier Forums thread
• Reddit thread