Regardless of the specific bugs he ran into, it is a product that only works well online, despite how difficult it is for a user to know for sure ahead of time what kind of connection will be available when it counts. Isn’t that just a fundamental miscalculation for this type of product? It’s almost guaranteed to put a certain percentage of your users in an embarrassing situation in front of an audience.
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There is an offline feature, it just didn’t work properly.
Having offline access to documents is a solved problem in cloud-backed apps, including Figma. All of the comments about the cloud component must be from people who have never used Figma. It’s not an inherently broken thing, it was just broken in Slides.
Figma’s other tools are generally good. That’s why it’s so confusing that they released Slides in such a broken state.
But I’m talking about Slides, not Figma in general. Presentation software actually working correctly when you have your presentation is mission-critical.
>despite how difficult it is for a user to know for sure ahead of time what kind of connection will be available
In 2025 it's a safe assumption to assume the user always has internet access. I've never had to worry if I will have internet access when I go to an event.
The user will always have internet access - except when it suddenly drops out during that one critical meeting.
Doing a presentation at a conference? The hotel promised there would be "internet", but failed to mention all 10.000 attendees would be sharing a 10Mbps link. Doing a presentation at another company? They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network, so Figma isn't loading - and your provider decided to temporarily block your 5G tethering due to "misuse". Presenting a keynote at Computex? Guess Figma is having an outage, better tell the hundreds of journalists to come back tomorrow!
Your internet may have always worked so far. Are you willing to bet your career on some random 3rd party internet connection - or Figma itself - never having an outage?
> Doing a presentation at another company? They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network
This happened to me lol. I copied a demo video from our landing page, and the host company somehow blocked our CDN, so the demo slide is just a blank page. Have to mouth the whole demo from memory, not too bad but it's really awkward.
>drops out during that one critical meeting
The article said that it handles drops of internet connections fine.
>sharing a 10Mbps link
You aren't streaming a video.
>They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network, so Figma isn't loading
Figma is an industry standard tool. It would be unlikely to be blocked.
>and your provider decided to temporarily block your 5G tethering due to "misuse"
You can probably present directly from your phone in this case.
>Guess Figma is having an outage, better tell the hundreds of journalists to come back tomorrow!
I guess so. Or the journalists can watch the livestream or a recording.
Sometimes I read comments and wonder how someone could be so divorced from reality.
> The article said that it handles drops of internet connections fine.
I ... don't think it does? It states the exact opposite at least twice:
> Just because you have a presentation open and loaded, doesn’t mean you can present it. If you are offline when you actually click Present, it will barf.
> Once you are presenting, you can click to “download” the presentation to be available offline – but be careful not to close the tab or it will undownload!
Events are actually one of the last places in the populated world without reliable internet, either from dead zones in a lot of facilities or overloaded wifi & local networks.
This is a bad assumption to make. There are infinitely many reasons why the internet could be not working currently. This is just lazy engineering and a lack of testing.
Which is why you need to weight then by likelihood. There will always be an infinite amount of things that can go wrong.
That doesn't change the fact that your point about internet always being available is not accurate at events with lots of people where networks may struggle or be overwhelmed, and there is a lot of interference. Not to mention, devices can have issues, there can be interference, etc.
No, it absolutely is not safe to assume that the user has Internet access, or that if they do the access is fast or reliable.
Figma Slides does not need fast and reliable internet.
Try connecting to the Wi-Fi at the London ExCeL or the Paris Expo sometime and then say that again with a straight face.
turn up during pre-conf, check your slides with conf IT, works beautifully.
Day of conf, 100x the number of users. Things go boom.
When I walk into a client's office for a meeting, I like to be able to plug into a projector and talk through my slides (which I export to PDF for simplicity). I don't want to have to ask for a guest Wifi password or anything else technical. As a result, I usually give presentations offline, unless the projector needs me to connect over the internet. Sure I could tether my laptop to my phone, but why add a dependency?
In 2025, what service provider are you using that never has service disruptions?
Having disruptions is handled fine as shown in the article.
You never actually did try to have a conference talk did you?