Welcome, tech friends

Happy Tuesday! Last week was action-packed, and the news keeps heating up.

Let's dive in! 👇

This week, we cover top tech giants and innovators in Quick Hits. For Trending Tools, we’re showcasing some fantastic new fast-rising products. This week’s Top Story covers The Figma Drafts Debacle and the continued fallout. For this week’s Productpickle, we look at recent website changes and a new demo video. For our Deep Dive, we review the fervor over Apple’s AI announcements. We’ve got a handful of great posts in this week’s Social Pulse, including a fun post on Design Challenges.

This week:

• ⚡ Quick Hits: News from Big Tech, Mistral, and TikTok

• 🔥 Trending Tools: Figgy, Linkz, Dupdub, Photopea, and Cello

• 🏆 Top Story: Figma turns its Back on Freelancers

• 🥒 Productpickle: A website rehaul and a new demo video

• 🔍 Deep Dive: Apple WWDC24 hot off the press

• 🌐 Social Pulse: Design Challenges, Beehiive, and more

🔥 TRENDING TOOLS

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🏆 TOP STORY

👀 The Figma Drafts Debacle

tldr: This week, Figma relocates drafts to team spaces, causing an internet uproar and disruption to designers everywhere.

Key Points:

• Draft Relocation: Drafts will move to a space called “Drafts to move,” and users can relocate them to the appropriate team spaces. (I only had 176 files to move.)

• Team Association: All drafts must now be associated with a team, ensuring access to paid features and improved security.

• Collaborator Management: Draft editors must be full team members; non-members will be reset to viewers.

Why this matters:

• Displacing Freelancers: The draft debacle creates another headache for an already strained class of freelancers. Figma issues free-lancers their eviction notice.

• Clarity and Confusion: Although Figma says these changes address unclear ownership and inconsistent product experiences, only time will tell if this and the next Drafts experience will be worth the cost.

• Bad Week for Design: It was a terrible week for the two biggest design companies between this drama and the backlash to Adobe’s new terms of service.

What you can do:

• Give clients view access only

• Send your client the .fig to add to their own account

• Ask your client to host the file instead of you

• Create a sh*tload of teams

🔗 Dylan Field’s Response

🔗 Figma’s Blog Post

🔗 Adobe Backlash on Training Data

🥒 PRODUCT PICKLE

Weekly anecdotes from the front lines

This week I rehauled productpickle.com with several new changes:

• NEW demo journey

• NEW hourly pricing

• NEW service pages

• NEW expertise pages

The changes aimed to articulate better who we serve and what we do. I hope these updates improve conversations with strategic partners and make referring potential clients to Productpickle easier.

We cleaned up our funnel with this new demo video:

Using AI to create hero images

I had some fun generating these hero images in Midjourney. Once I had the asset I wanted, I used Photopea to remove background elements. From there, I used Figma to place the UI elements in the image.

Here is the hero image for the new AI page:

🔍 DEEP DIVE

An in-depth breakdown of something interesting

WWDC 2024: Apple's New Era of AI and Major Software Updates

Apple launched a new era of AI — branded as Apple Intelligence — showcasing AI-powered features set to debut on the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and devices with Apple's M series chips. These features include:

• Writing Assistance: Enhanced suggestions for tone and formatting in Mail.

• Image Editing: Create custom emojis and use the Image Playground to generate graphics from prompts.

• Photo Tools: A Magic Eraser-like feature for removing background objects and a story creation tool that compiles photos and videos based on prompts.

• Security Focus: Apple ensures that data related to Apple Intelligence remains private, processed either on-device or through secure Apple services without being stored.

On the final bullet, Elon immediately fired shots:

ChatGPT will be equipped on iPhones

1. Access ChatGPT from Siri

2. Share photos with ChatGPT and get suggestions

3. Create images and texts within documents

Products impacted by Apple News:

• Grammarly —> Apple Intelligence

• Midjourney —> image generation

• Calculator apps —> math app

• 1Password —> password app

• Humane and Rabbit —> Apple Watch

• Athlytics —> Apple Watch

• Whoop —> Apple Watch

• AllTrails —> Apple Maps

• Magnet —> window snapping

• Bezel —> iPhone mirroring

• ChatGPT wrappers —> ChatGPT

• Tape a Call —> record from phone

• Soulver —> math notes

• Newji —> genmoji

Siri's AI Boost

Siri receives a significant upgrade with deep integration into iPhone functions, powered by large language models (LLMs). New capabilities include:

• App Control: Search within emails, surface-specific photos.

• ChatGPT Integration: Use ChatGPT through Siri for enhanced query responses.

Additional AI Features Across Apps

- Mail: Summarize emails and generate responses.

- Photos: Search using natural language, and clean up background objects.

- Notes & Phone: AI-powered transcriptions and summaries.

🔗 13 Biggest Announcements

🌐 SOCIAL PULSE

Highlights from social media and key topics of the week

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