Now that air travel is starting to open back up again, it would be nice to have the Figma offline experience be better. For example, I went on a short flight this morning and wanted to work on a design, but certain features weren’t available or would break because I was offline.
Overall, because I had my file open in the standalone app before going offline, being able to have it open and work on it was fine, but with a few hiccups.
Notably plugins didn’t work. I tried Move Layers and Arrow Auto and neither’s palette showed up when selecting them from the Plugins menu.
Colors from a shared library didn’t work, even if those color are already in the file.
Component or asset search didn’t work, even if trying to only search within my local file.
I’m not sure if there are workarounds for these issues, but please let me know if there are.
Otherwise, here are some ideas on how the above could be solved…
- Plugins: For plugins that don’t require the Internet (I would assume most!), they should be downloaded locally and should be run locally. Maybe there can be periodic checks for updates, but I don’t understand why they’re not local.
- Color styles: These should also be local, especially if they are being actively used in the file.
- Asset search: Looking for local components should not result in a forever-spinning wheel. Seems like a local search engine should help.