Figma

Motion is becoming way more reusable with the latest Figma update. You can now save custom animation styles with your own easing and duration and reuse them across files, instead of rebuilding the same animation every time. You can now also add audio files on your timeline, so you can drag a file onto a clip, trim it against your keyframes, and export it together with the animation. You will also be able to do better text animations, animate by character or word to be more expressive. And a final great inclusion: export straight to Lottie or dotLottie which makes your animations great for implementing in a real product.

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Some smaller updates that also got added in Figma:

  • Auto layout now supports vertical wrap, so overflow content wraps into a new column instead of pushing past the frame, matching how CSS flexbox already behaves.
  • Figma's mobile app got some improvements for navigating and collaborating on the go: a page dropdown, a frame preview slider, sharable links to the exact frame you're viewing, and picking up right where you left off.
  • You can now post "riffs" to the Figma Community, a new way to share prototypes, animations, and experiments straight to your profile.

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Duo-Man turns the iPhone Duo into a Walkman

One of the more fun things that went around this week was Duo-Man, a prototype that turns the iPhone Duo into a working Walkman, cassette tapes. Vidit Bhargava built it during the Bitrig Hacks hackathon and it took off online. Bitrig posted a video where he talks through the whole process, from studying how a cassette tape actually loops to recording real Walkman button clicks for the sound design.

He also goes into how he used the iPhone Duo's Arrangement Views to build separate interfaces for the open and closed states, and why he designed the whole thing to still work fully even if you never open the screen. Vidit built it fast using Bitrig, an AI tool for building native Swift apps for Apple platforms, sketching the UI and cassette mechanics first before prompting his way to a working build. Next up for Duo-Man: Apple Music support, bringing it to regular iPhones, and using the Apple Pencil to untangle a virtual cassette tape.

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Rive

Rive is getting ready for their big 1.0 release, so they are finishing some things up, with yet again quite some new features. Here’s a small selection:

  • Gamepad input: drive a state machine with a controller's buttons and sticks, which makes building something like a small game a lot easier.
  • Text Input: draw an editable text field right in Rive and set its font, colors, and placeholder in the Inspector.
  • Accessibility: give elements a role like button, checkbox, or slider so screen readers can read and navigate your file.
  • Grid and Stack layouts: next to Row and Column, you can now use Grid and Stack, with columns and rows you can size and reorder by dragging.
  • Scroll to selection: press X to jump the Hierarchy and timeline to your selected layer, handy in bigger files.

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Paper ships faster performance, agent setup, and a new shader

Connecting your AI agent to Paper's MCP should now be easier. In the connection panel you can puck your harness and connect it to the MCP in a single click.

They also updated the Paper Texture shader which now has new color schemes and a wrinkles property.

Some smaller but really nice updates:

  • Copy a selection as React, CSS or Tailwind from the export panel
  • The web app now supports WebMCP so you no longer need the mac app to use MCP
  • You can now generate image using MCP