Something really hit home with me this week when I was playing around with Sketch. I was working on a file that I was going to edit on other machines, so I made it a Sketch Cloud document. This theoretically makes Sketch more like Figma, which is great since I'm someone who generally prefers Sketch's UI, but require the features Figma provides.

My joy was dampened, however when I realized that every time I saved the file (something Figma just does, you don't need to manually save), Sketch would upload the entire file again to their cloud service. This isn't a huge deal on small files, but it quickly gets out of hand when you start dealing with bigger projects or even small ones with files eclipsing a few megabytes.

I don't think Sketch is bad, and I'm sure there are reasonable technical reasons they upload the whole file rather than just the diffs from the last version, but as a user it's hard to deal with, and I think it's a good example of the difference between an app that was built for the web and one that was built for the desktop and then had cloud features added on top.

Check out the video below to see this in action, a story about my attempt to download a "huge" file in the 90s, and why the dogmatic stance some take on web apps vs native apps rubs me the wrong way.