this is why product designers need an IDE, not a drawing tool

600+ variants?? and the mechanic for creating them is…editing each one by hand???

the sheer lack of imagination in design tooling astounds me https://twitter.com/jhilmd/status/1331739503405383680

for example

autolayout in figma is a practical affordance to lift up a very tedious process of ordering and spacing

but it requires too much maintenance, too many touchpoints, too much "meta-gaming" where you want more out of it, more control and freedom, but it falls short

we don't need fancier affordances, we need more powerful, expressive tooling that lets us — if not build — simulate the statefulness and timeliness of digital products

plugins are not enough
APIs are not enough
magic motion is not enough
variants are not enough

of course, the figma team is excellent. they make good work (even though i've always been critical) and have made a huge impact on the way designers can work

but i'm only using figma as a salient example

overall: why is there no utopian spirit in design tools?

two ideas i've toyed with:

"semantic components" -- components are defined with base states, adjustment rules, and relationships. they're not "built things" but simulated environments

computed constraints -- layouts and styles adjust based on programatic rules and relationships

some things that i find missing as first-class features in product design tools:
- statefulness (not just states)
- relationships
- rules-based constraints
- non-visual syntax or markup affordances

some examples of interesting design tools with a utopian feel:

http://subformapp.com 
http://sketch.systems  (also shared by @automaticyes)
@RoamResearch if used for design problems
@framer
@FacebookOrigami

a few more tools from outside digital design that are good analogues for this problem:

@Ableton Max for Live https://www.ableton.com/en/live/max-for-live/

Grasshopper for Rhino https://www.grasshopper3d.com/ 

https://twitter.com/theflowingsky/status/1332222430073524224

this is very cool — the underlying XML format Glade uses to build some OS elements (menus and toolbars)

the most interesting things to me are the "name" and "handler" attributes. need to read through the docs more, but there's something neat here

https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkUIManager.html#XML-UI