SitePoint Weekly #10

🍓 The freshest resources, stories, and exclusive content for web developers, designers, and digital creators.

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Pointed Advice

🦾 A selection of our latest articles and tutorials

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Monopoly. Bingo! Snake or Ladder?

🍕 Web development and technology links from around the web

Versioning
Web development, design, and tooling

• Microsoft has brought browser developer tools to Visual Studio Code - Microsoft Edge Blog.
• Sketch 69 has arrived, including color variables, a new components view, a new insert window, and many other smaller features.
• DigitalOcean announces its take on a modern PaaS, DigitalOcean App Platform.
• There’s a good reason why experienced devs say “it depends” so often.
• Fast provides a simple, yet powerful boilerplate, to get you started with any frontend project.
• Parsel is a tiny, permissive CSS selector parser.
• BotFlow is a JavaScript library that accepts Twilio Studio config files and provides the same functionality on an independent backend service.

• As he departs in the wake of this year’s layoffs, David Walsh recollects nearly 20 years at Mozilla.

• Building a sharp, mobile-ready navbar in any web framework.

• Canonic is a low-code platform for crafting APIs in minutes.

• Coil uses a proposed W3C standard, Web Monetization, to allow browsers to pay for websites and for websites to adjust functionality in response to payment.

• This video series shows you how to build Next.js Jamstack apps with Airtable for data, Tailwind for styling, and Auth0 for authentication.

OUR STACK

Mailbrew: Your personal daily digest

Mailbrew keeps you up-to-date and surfaces the most interesting new content while getting noise under control — and it makes content consumption enjoyable again in the process.

It's a brilliant app from two founders in Italy and they've been shipping improvements constantly since its launch earlier this year. They won me over quickly, and I became an annual subscriber in August.

With Mailbrew you can create a daily digest that keeps you informed across all of your interests, a weekly roundup that has all the latest on a favorite app, a monthly monitoring email, or anything in between. Numerous data sources are supported, including RSS feeds, Twitter users, subreddits, and Product Hunt.

As time goes on the team's real endgame is coming into focus. The last two headline features:

• Mailbrew Inbox is a place to receive newsletters instead of your overwhelmed inbox. Links to newly-arrived issues are pinned to the top of your daily digest too, so I'm reading more of my subscriptions than ever and still saving time.
• Mailbrew Read Later lets you quickly save links as you browse for a better time. There are plenty of apps in this space already. But the benefit of having one location for all your content instead of another six buckets to manage? Pure relief.

In other words, Mailbrew is quickly becoming the one place you need for managing your digital reading. We reached out to Fabrizio and Francesco to sort out a great deal for readers. If you sign up via our link, you'll get an extended 30 day trial (instead of 14) and a 30% discount on any monthly or annual plan.

➤ Mailbrew: Your personal daily digest

It's possible for us to earn a small commission via this link, but this is all about sharing a great deal with subscribers on a tool that we love, use, and pay for ourselves from a founder team we support.

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Logic Flow
Computing, customization, automation, and productivity​

Darling is a translation layer that lets you run macOS software on Linux. In other words, it’s Wine but for macOS apps.

GUI support is in the earliest experimental stages, and I’m not sure what happens when apps depend on deep integration! features like iCloud, but I hope this project is able to make major progress.

When I first experimented with Wine apps using Linux as a teenager, it was an experience of last resort. Proton and other projects have moved that ecosystem ahead by leaps, and Linux gamers today often report better performance running their Windows games under Linux than on Windows itself.

If you could do the same with the great third-party professional and productivity apps on macOS, then the list of rational reasons to use the proprietary operating systems becomes very short.

• Have you been experiencing extreme battery drain on iOS 14? No such issues for me, but Apple says you might need to wipe your phone to recover.
• Copy unusual characters and symbols easily with CopyChar, a handy web-based tool.
• Arguments that you retain more when taking handwritten notes appear to be well-founded — here’s why writing by hand makes kids smarter.
• Taskade launched version 3.0 of its collaborative productivity tool for remote teams this week, which it says includes team calendars, mindmap, and org chart views, native apps, and a heap of other stuff.
• Card wants to help you share your contacts and social profiles easily.
• In case you missed it: watchOS 7 now allows you to customize ring goals.
• Lucidspark is a virtual whiteboard where teams can brainstorm remotely in real-time.
• OpenStartup.dev is a curated collection of open startups. These are transparent companies that share their metrics publicly rather than startups with an open source product, but this is useful nonetheless.
• Layer helps you manage and automate your Excel workflows, and share data from your spreadsheet files granularly. Just don’t use it to manage your countries Covid response.

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The Rundown
Technology news, society, and culture

A huge U.S. Congress report condemns Big Tech’s ‘monopoly power’ and urges their breakups. It proposes ways to undo the antitrust legislation deterioration of the past few decades and address new issues, including:

• limiting companies' ability to run a platform and compete (at least unfairly) with third parties on that platform
• preventing companies from giving themselves preferential treatment for other products against third parties on the platforms they run
• requiring online marketplaces to be independently run, or setting rules around how they can be run
• requiring social networks to build in the capacity for interoperability and data portability — this one feels huge and displays a level of understanding of the technical issues that I didn’t expect to make it into a government report

The companies in question have made a fresh round of statements denying any monopoly power whatsoever. Who’d expect anything else? But it’s a substantive report with a set of proportionate teeth that feels like it came from a less dystopian time.

Unfortunately, political fighting is already fracturing the committee, and who knows whether we'll see a serious look at considered policies or another silly pageant about rooting out anti-conservative bias at Facebook. These matters are serious — unfortunately, our past expectation that existential issues would be treated as a point of bipartisan leadership rather than a political stage show seems quaint. While the tech companies are playing Monopoly, politics has become as insane and inane as Snakes and Ladders.

We'll keep an eye on things and see what eventuates. The report's recommendations now only need to survive 46,000 rounds of bureaucratic attrition and lobbyist warfare, but they've produced a very solid start.

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Excel and its million-row limit are being blamed for a failure that led Public Health England to misplace nearly 16,000 COVID test results.

Clearly, though, this mistake can be laid at the feet of the people who chose a spreadsheeting system with a million-row limit for a large-scale data job of this importance. As Mic Wright explains, journalists are doing their societies a disservice by cozily calling these government failures of critical decision-making ‘glitches.’

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The Illegal Campaign to Eliminate Julian Assange: As the most important press freedom case of our generation unfolds in London, Charles Glass brings the benefit of a decade’s hindsight to this review of the unrelenting campaign to destroy Julian Assange’s life. Had all proper nouns been redacted, the sheer criminality is something we’d quickly assume came from China, Russia, or Iran.

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Google will pay publishers more than $1 billion to create and curate high-quality content.

It's good to see efforts being made to allow value creators to capture more of the value they generate in assessable ways. Don't let your warm fuzzies run amok, though. Ahead of monopoly intervention but motivated by the threat thereof, this is the optimal solution for Google, and part of broader efforts by large tech companies to find out how little they can concede at the last minute before those decisions are made for them.

To see the dynamic support more sensible fundamentals — where value creators receive more economic benefit from first-order creation than those who index or distribute it — we still need to put effective restraints on the anticompetitive exercise of market power back in place.

Axios also notes that News Corp has changed its tune on Big Tech, ostensibly in this initiative's wake. Google's approach is underpinned by better, more quantitatively determined fundamentals than News Corp's approach, which was to call out a random ballpark licensing tithe that supposedly accounts for direct and indirect value provision. On the other hand, you don't want characters like these burying the hatchet and getting too chummy.

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• Apple has scheduled its iPhone 12 media event for October 13. Will it involve this new patent for a foldable design with a self-healing display? No, but we’ll all be keeping an eye on this either way.
• Apple removed two RSS feed readers from the Chinese App Store at the state censors' request.
• Our new pandemic lifestyles mean App Store revenues grew 31% last quarter from $14.5B to $19B. With some cloud infrastructure, a payment gateway, and 12 minutes of review time per app, you too can run a money-printing operation*.

* Duopoly market position and infantilizing platform lockdown not included

• Huge If True & Clinically Viable: researchers in Melbourne, Australia have built a bionic device that can restore vision to the 100% blind through a brain implant. The same implants could potentially treat paralysis, too.
• By replacing traditional video codecs with a neural network, Nvidia announces a way to reduce video bandwidth to one-tenth its current average — from 97.28KB per frame to just 0.1165KB per frame according to this YouTube demo.
• A security flaw left ‘smart’ chastity toy users at risk of permanent lock-in. Probably don't put your genitalia in cloud-controlled locks, btw.
• Facebook has a new, harder stance on taking down QAnon content. Also, reports of a harder stance from Facebook's algorithm on red onions, which are “overtly sexualized.”
• The subtle effects of blood circulation can be used to detect deep fakes.
• John McAfee has been arrested in Spain on allegations of tax evasion. The SEC sued him on the same day for undisclosed ICO promotion.
• Netflix is trying to make it easier to find something new to watch with a New & Popular tab.
• The NSA phone surveillance program was illegal and expensive… and it did not stop a single terrorist attack.
• Employers are using digital surveillance technology to spy on remote workers in their own homes.

• You don’t own your Kindle books, Amazon kindly reminds a customer.

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Connect with the community

We'll see you in the next edition — in the meantime, connect with us for a chat through our various communities:

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Until next time,

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Joel Falconer
Managing Editor