Dev builds plugins for Obsidian, VS Code, and Figma — and finds each a walled garden
A developer built text and image integrations for three desktop apps — Obsidian, VS Code, and Figma — and documented the hidden complexities each platform imposes on plugin authors. Figma proved the most restrictive, requiring a multi-step publish flow: create a draft post, obtain a temporary upload URL, PUT the image bytes, confirm media, then finalize the post. Because Figma separates the document-access thread from the UI thread, raw PNG bytes had to be serialized and passed via postMessage before any network call could be made. The plugin UI runs in a sandboxed iframe with a null origin, meaning the backend API had to be specifically configured to accept such requests or the code would silently fail at the last step. The developer's key takeaway is that plugin development means operating entirely within another app's rules — even a basic HTTP request must be carefully earned rather than assumed.
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