SitePoint Weekly #15
Silicon Speed

🍓 The freshest resources for web developers, designers, and makers.

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Pointed Advice
Just published on SitePoint

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Silicon Speed
Your weekly tech digest

The Rundown
Technology news, society, and internet culture

Apple Reduces App Store Commissions to 15% for Small Businesses Starting Next Year:

"Starting January 1, 2021, developers who earn up to $1 million per year from their apps will have the commission paid to Apple cut in half, reducing it from 30% to 15%."

This is very good news for small developers. We can celebrate that without losing sight of the fundamental problems underneath the specific percentages and other details. This play is intended precisely to make those waters murky. It’s an act of careful concession management rather than a sign of any fundamental change. No matter your size, there’s nothing about distribution infrastructure and payment processing that justifies a revenue share that approaches joint-venture splits. And Apple still won’t loosen its iron grip on the code you can execute on your device, which is still by far the most egregious factor in all of this.

But if you've been giving up such a massive chunk of your income on amounts that barely give you room to grow your operation, this will come with a sigh of relief.

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Apple Silicon is in the wild, and the results are pretty mind-blowing, even for those who were prepared for these chips to take everyone by surprise. For instance, the M1 compiles code as fast as a 2019 Mac Pro, and barely touches the MacBook Pro's battery in the process. The MacBook Air is even a useful machine that has a reason to exist again, according to The Verge's review. Here's the fanless MacBook Air chomping away at Minecraft at 60fps.

If anything, even as we watch in awe, it looks like we're still underestimating the impact of Apple Silicon overall. These new chips have effectively rendered the competition obsolete. That they're never going to find their way into anything that Apple doesn't make is Intel and AMD's one saving grace. It does present us with the unsettling question... what happens when the best processors in the world, by a long shot, will only serve to strengthen one of the world's most determined enemies of open platforms?

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YouTube will now run ads on videos posted by channels too small to get into the Partner Program... and keep the proceeds to themselves. Shameless monetization of other people’s work by the world’s most profitable corporations is inherently disgusting, and yet has become par for the course — with no signs of slowing down yet.

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Musicians get the bulk of ticket sales with Bandcamp’s new live-streaming concert feature:

"Bandcamp has been something of a lifesaver for many artists who make fractions of a cent on streaming revenue. Among other things, the site has set up the wildly popular Bandcamp Fridays, wherein it waves its fees for one week a month. Now it’s getting into live streaming, as musicians look for ways to offer remote performances for fans."

Ticketed live streaming comes to Bandcamp, with Bandcamp once again demonstrating that sustainable supporting services can be built while still enabling us to use the internet to ensure first-order creators get the first order of revenue from their efforts. As TechCrunch's Brian Heater alludes to above, it's a far cry from the fraction of a cent musicians make from the streaming barons — not even enough to rub two cents together with.

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• The EFF got GitHub to reverse the DMCA takedown of the popular youtube-dl repo. Much of this post is obvious corporate spin, but there are some additional good outcomes here around changes to the way GitHub handles DMCA requests.
• Facebook wants to shut down an academic study of political ad targeting, just as it prepares to reinstate targeted political ads.
• Facebook employees and executives are battling over how to reduce misinformation and hate speech without hurting the company’s bottom line.
• Twitter will relaunch account verifications in early 2021 for certain categories of user and is asking for feedback on its policy.
• China has launched the world's first 6G satellite. We don't even know what 6G is yet. "This could be huge. It also could be nothing."

Versioning
Web development, design, and tooling

• Tailwind version 2.0 is officially here, and brings with it focus rings, a native dark mode feature, and an extended color palette, among other things. Also, the new landing page is a work of craftsmanship.
• Chakra UI, a rising star in the React component library world, just hit version 1.0. And OpenChakra is a neat bit of kit — it's a drag-and-drop editor for Chakra UI that lets you refine the composition of components in a more native (i.e. visual) medium, and then take the clean production-ready code back to your editor. (h/t to former SitePoint managing editor and incumbent friend Aaron Osteraas)
• Angular 11 is also here.
• How a developer broke the internet by unpublishing his package containing 11 lines of code.
• Katie Sylor-Miller discusses some reasonable concerns around Core Web Vitals and the practices it will incentivize.
• Lee Robinson writes about Next.js’s gradual adoption-friendly design, and strategies for slowly migrating a project over.
• The way we train AI is fundamentally flawed: "The process used to build most of the machine-learning models we use today can't tell if they will work in the real world or not—and that’s a problem."
• Alex Trost shows you how to think outside the box with CSS Grid.
• Standardizing and beyond: the past, present and future of native HTML form controls.
• Jam Wand is an interface for non-technical team members to make copy changes with minimal dev time. It opens up pull requests to the codebase, so all engineers have to do is review and merge, and the copy change is live.
• React Colorful offers a fast, minimalist alternative to React Color.
• Upptime is a GitHub-powered open-source uptime monitor and status page.

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Logic Flow
Computing, automation, productivity​, and tools for thought

• Notion's iOS app now offers some basic widgets for getting to favorited pages.
• Roam Research is a great app with a cult following... and a not so great icon. While that's not enough to stop users from loving Roam, it does feel even more out of place among Big Sur-style icons. Mailbrew co-founder and designer Fabrizio Rinaldi released a Roam Research Big Sur icon that you can download and apply yourself.
• A new Roam command lets you create or find blocks at specific locations on other pages and reference them where you currently are.
• Google Chrome for M1 Macs is out. Here’s how to get it.
• Could this be the most underrated Chrome extension? Make sure you’re the only one contributing to your tab-fuelled fugue state with Death To _blank, which overrides the _blank parameter on links. Just add the web apps where you want external links to open in new tabs to the whitelist.
• E.gg is an iOS app for building zines out of photos, GIFs, drawings, and text.
• Easily make screenshots look better with Pretty Snap, which lets you quickly add some padding and a screenshot-friendly background.
• Learn about the birth of UNIX in this podcast interview with Brian Kernighan.

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Our favorite setup this week is this Dynamic Window Manager rice named Sunrise. It's got a great color palette that's well-balanced but also pretty unique between the pastel, hacker-green, or monotone setups. 

• [dwm] Sunrise
• Dotfiles and wallpaper

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Connect with the community

That's it for this week's issue. We'll see you in the next one — in the meantime, connect with us for a chat through our various communities:

• the SitePoint forums
• our Discord server
• read new articles
• or via Twitter

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Until next time,

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Joel Falconer
Managing Editor