Hello everyone, we are a creative studio and over the past years we build custom tools to simplify our work and reduce the work hours.
Each plugin is made with a different purpose and all of them will have monthly updates with new features.
The 3 plugins are: Experience Generator, Icons and Inspect.
Experience Generator purpose is generator artboards for the different purposes. The purposes are defined in the plugin.
Icons works differently that the usual icon pickers, in our case we add the icons to the artboard as a FONT, that way if you want to change an icon you only need to edit the text. For now it only works with FONT AWESOME PRO.
Inspect is will go to your entire website and find the images and other things that you may need to your design reducing the time to fetch images and find sizes.
The combination are part of our Experience Suite and more plugins will follow up. We are trying to respect the community and not build plugins that mimic or imitate other plugins. They are different by design and the target user is different. For example icondrop is more complete and powerful than ours and we love them
We are waiting for them to be released by Adobe:slight_smile:
THE THREE PLUGINS ARE LIVE, INSTALL VIA PLUGIN MANAGER TO GET AUTOMATICALLY UPGRADES.
This raises an important question that some developers in my community have asked about, and I think we need some clarification on the official policy here.
All three of the plugins described here are similar to plugins already in the XD Plugin Manager:
Icons does the same thing as Ikono. The only difference is it uses font Font Awesome Pro instead of Ikono Mini.
Inspect does something very similar to Mimic, with a different UI.
Experience Generator is already the name of a plugin with a different UI. It doesn’t have the same URL and Social Media tabs, though.
What is our official stance on very similar plugins?
Greetings Erin, I’m part of the team behind Icons, Inspect and Experience Generator. Before anything I’d like to thank you, we’re really excited about them and eager to develop more useful tools inside XD!
Regarding your insights about the similarities to other plugins, you raise a good question, although I would like to address a few points:
Regarding Icons doing the same thing as Ikono, I believe we may have been misunderstood due to the early state of the plugin. Ikono seems like a library for a single font, Ikono Mini. Our intention with Icons is to provide several icon libraries inside one single plugin, the fact that only Font Awesome Pro is available is solely due to our personal usage priority, but we will be adding more libraries very soon;
Although the end of Inspect and Mimic seems to be the same, you may notice that their workflows are completly different. Mimic provides the results in XD’s canvas as objects, while Inspect lists the assets on the dialog for the user to choose what to use. Also, we are currently developing, at the time of this message, a new version that also provides text content, styling such as colors, fonts, and other CSS parameters.
Finally, regarding Experience Generator, I may be wrong but I believe the plugin with the same name you’re refeering to is actually our first version of it. Experience Generator was the first plugin we submited. We refactored it and redesigned the UI to be in synch with the rest of the set and Adobe XD’s UI itself. As you very well noticed, we also added the Social Media feature, to generate artboard sets of experiences specific to social media platforms. There’s a new version on the making, that will also allow the user to search URL’s and generate Artboards following it’s page structure.
If only the name of the icon is placed on the artboard, it might be that you don’t have all the font files from Font Awesome Pro installed in your machine. To be sure, there are 4 “sub-families”: Brands, Light, Regular and Solid. As of now, usage of the Icons plugin requires a valid Font Awesome Pro license and fonts installed, otherwise, the text-code will appear as simple text.
If you are Experience Generator I feel much better about all of that! I’m glad you’ve improved your UI.
As for our team’s take on similar plugins, the plugin manager is essentially an open market now that it’s public. We’ve never promised “one plugin for one thing”. If anything, multiple plugins that do the same thing means that you’ve created a fix for a problem that many people have.
Ikono also intends to add more font libraries, so both plugins will need to compete for the better user experience.
I have been working on a web export plugin and have seen a few other plugins that export to HTML announced.
One of them exports text to HTML. I think Pablo added support for it in one of his plugins. His export is different than what I do. I think he has paragraphs, bold and italic tags and so on. Mine exports spans with styles inline. I like his export more.
I don’t plan to change how I export the text part of the HTML but I plan to add support for classes in the near future because it’s part of the goal for a full page export.
The way I’m developing is for a few specific use cases. I’ve posted an introduction post recently that describes those use cases.
There’s another plugin that exports to multiple formats including HTML and iOS apps. That’s awesome! I don’t plan to support exporting to iOS or any of the other formats listed in their plugin.
Before the plugin manager, developers didn’t know if anyone else had made something they needed or wanted to create. Now they can search through the existing plugins and see if it already exists and determine if there’s a need for it.
The duplication of plugins happens because everything is new and we didn’t knew what others where doing.
Our focus is to develop plugins connected to our proprietary cloud services
Inspect Plugin is our main focus, we already obtain IMAGES, in next version we have a few surprises. There is space for all and we will focus on what we do best.
Export to HTML was of course another idea that everyone had, share to social media platforms is another, working with live data was another.
The only reason I publish ours, is to have something for our team to work with Font awesome pro until something better comes
I also believe competition is a good thing. As @Velara mentioned (I love his take on exporting for the web in his Web Export plugin, by the way ), everyone has a slightly different take on things, and the fact we have to remember is that we’re not creating the plugins for ourselves. Of course, everyone has to pay his or her bills at the end of the day, but we have to remember that we’re building plugins to make the life of designers easier.
That’s also why I think competition is something good. Of course, if someone copies the same plugin, that wouldn’t be appreciated, but different takes on a problem can lead to better results for both sides.
Also, if someone asks me if I could do something different in my generated HTML and another plugin already does it, I’m more than happy to point to that plugin (I find all the plugins I’ve tested exciting and would recommend them even if they were a direct competitor ) – I think it’s actually better to create smaller plugins instead of an all-in-one device suitable for every purpose, so one can focus more on the experience of this very specific thing (and provide the best one for this specific user group).
In conclusion, I believe (from what I saw of the community in the beta program) that the question about very similar plugins shouldn’t be treated as a problem.
In the end, there will always be plugins that can do something similar, but with a slightly different style. And there will be different kinds of designers, each preferring a different manner. It is important to remember that we’re providing a better experience for these designers, and from the reactions I have seen in this thread, I think we can be hopeful that this community (aside from natural competition) won’t treat this as a problem and we can focus on creating great plugins with – while similar in general, each having its very own style fitting its very own type of designer. BTW: I absolutely love this community: The fact that even a discussion about competition doesn’t degenerate into something emotional is absolutely awsome !
Thanks for posting!
), everyone has a slightly different take on things, and the fact we have to remember is that we’re not creating the plugins for ourselves. Of course, everyone has to pay his or her bills at the end of the day, but we have to remember that we’re building plugins to make the life of designers easier.
) – I think it’s actually better to create smaller plugins instead of an all-in-one device suitable for every purpose, so one can focus more on the experience of this very specific thing (and provide the best one for this specific user group).
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