LazyLord

Moving artwork between design and motion apps usually means the same loop: export an SVG, re-import it, watch gradients flatten, retype text that arrived as a picture, and repeat it all whenever the design changes. Overlord, the popular tool for this job, is paid, which is exactly the barrier for freelancers and small studios.

Architectural challenges:
1. Four different worlds: Figma's Plugin API plus three entirely separate ExtendScript object models in Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects. Every app has to send to and receive from the other three, twelve routes in all, and a converter per route would be unmaintainable.
2. Real artwork: Bézier paths must stay paths, text must stay editable text, and layer structure and position must survive the trip.
3. Updating without destroying: sending a changed design again should update what was built before, without silently overwriting edits the user made by hand.
4. Privacy and zero-friction install: no cloud, no account, no uploads, working offline, and no Node.js, extension manager or separate server for the user to run, even though Figma lets no installer add a plugin.

1. One shared intermediate representation: a TypeScript core package turns artwork into an app-neutral description (geometry, SVG paths, a message protocol). Each app has a reader that produces that description and a writer that rebuilds native layers from it, so four readers and four writers cover all twelve routes instead of twelve converters.

2. A bridge on your own machine: the first LazyLord panel you open quietly runs a relay on ws://localhost:7878, and the other panels and the Figma plugin connect to it. There is no separate program or console window, and nothing leaves the computer.

3. Update in place with edit detection: sending again replaces what was built before, keeping its position and grouping. If a layer was changed by hand, LazyLord asks before overwriting it.

4. Live mode: keep one app updating as you work in another.

5. Honest reporting: anything an app cannot rebuild, such as inner shadows in After Effects, is listed on the transfer instead of being silently dropped.

6. Figma extras: image scale from 1x to 4x, an option to send complex layers as images that is remembered in the file, and a new document or composition at the frame's size when everything sent sits inside one frame.

7. Friction-free install: a .bat installer on Windows and a .command on macOS, with no Node.js or extension manager. A helper script copies the Figma plugin somewhere permanent and puts its path on the clipboard, leaving three clicks.

8. Free forever: open source under the MIT licence, for Windows and macOS, with Adobe apps from 2021 onwards.