SitePoint Weekly – 25 September 2020

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

♾️

Pointed Advice

🦾 A selection of our latest articles and tutorials

♾️

A Principle of Reciprocity

🍕 Web development and technology links from around the web

The Rundown
Technology news, society, and culture

TikTok and WeChat managed to avoid their bans for another week, and a judge gave the Trump administration until Friday to either defend the TikTok ban or delay it.

The United States government's next primary target: the gaming industry.

• Tencent has made significant investments there over the past decade, including Riot Games (League of Legends) and Epic Games (Fortnite).
• These are massive stakes — Tencent effectively owns Riot, and 40% of Epic.
• Activision Blizzard has taken the most heat for its links to date, despite that stake only coming to 4.9%.
• Hundreds of other gaming industry investments are part of that portfolio.

The open web has a problem. We've seen liberal democratic values themselves used as an attack vector by authoritarian rivals before, and it's one of the most evident weaknesses of our society's model in the connected age. And as the current versions of our culture and internet tend to do, we all feel under pressure to pick up our appropriately axial policies like wooden swords and fight with them — Chinese ownership, in or out, left or right? But it's not that simple.

I'm not a China expert, and I defer to Ben Thompson for background and strategic analysis. He explains more articulately in Exponent #187 that Chinese platforms don't approach our yard of the web until they emerge — the victorious ones, that is — from a high-stakes cage battle to the death. It's a fight for the engagement of China's 1 billion users, a market that's entirely mobile-first and has come to expect algorithmic engagement techniques that are nigh on unfailing. The Chinese tech market is an incubator for ruthless Western tech company killers. If you've seen TikTok's algorithm at work, you know that Facebook can't touch it, Twitter hasn't got a hope, and even YouTube's famous recommendation engine looks crude in comparison.

When companies like ByteDance unleash apps like TikTok in the West, our tech monopolies are akin to a rag-tag band of knife-wielding street thugs standing in the middle of the Somme. We already have our laundry list of issues with these companies, and we're rightfully keeping them preoccupied with attempts to begin a phase of accountability at home.

But even if we weren't, they'd be unprepared. There's no access given to the Chinese market in exchange for our openness, not without entering into an equally owned joint venture with one of the local entities. The only path to a level playing field virtually demands forfeit, whether in spirit or source code access.

Our best shot at a good outcome isn't a naive and unnuanced approach in which we ignore the problem in the name of said values. As Thompson says, China splinted the internet long ago. That ship has sailed. What remains to be seen is how motivated we are to ensure an open future for the rest of it, one that'll be a model of values-based custodianship. One that'll still be there for the Chinese people to join if they make their way to a more individualistic form of governance. Otherwise, we'll end up watching an ambitious outside entity snap up the commercial web's user-facing layer, consolidate power, and erode that openness to an extent we've not yet seen from our comparably cuddly industry. But we can solve this without morally compromising ourselves in a way that ultimately unravels the whole thing.

We need a principle of reciprocity — one where we mutually require nation-states that play on the open web's economic field to adopt (or at least abide by) those values and offer market openness to all other participants.

Whether that demands openness of other varieties — of speech, for example — is another discussion. The core of the matter here is that if you want to make money from our users, we've got to be able to compete in your country's digital markets and make money from your users, without lopsided barriers to entry.

In theory, this could be done using economic and diplomatic levers alone, without introducing new shiny toys for prospective fascists into the underlying infrastructure and creating new risks to internet freedom. It's most likely that the end result is the same, because China is not about to open its market. But the immediate outcome is only part of the story. The means and methods getting there are momentously consequential.

So what's the big issue here?

First, it's all too clear that the Western contingent, as represented by Trump, has no sincere overarching philosophy that defines the parameters of failure and success. In practice, this is a political exercise by a man whose obsessive self-interest defines every action he takes. As with most Trumpian blusters, the stakes looked high at the outset. By the end, we're looking at some weak, convoluted arrangement that doesn't change the underlying dynamic of the game in the real world. Further, the non-solution directly erodes web freedom by normalizing case-by-case intervention in the internet's shape, as opposed to a system that provides rules-based certainty such as a clearly-defined understanding of valid reciprocity. Perhaps more dangerously, it closes the issue while it remains unsolved. And even when the stakes looked consequential, Trump pitched the danger of TikTok's ownership as a security concern, not a defense of the spirit of the open web. That's not a position that has ever even crossed 45's mind. That Trump might find an open internet threatening himself seems congruent enough.

This is a spectacle of strength that disguises another shakedown deal engineered by a reality star. It makes a joke of the real issues and makes any solution with genuine fairness and teeth less likely ever to eventuate. The proposed resolution has even put the EFF in the position of indirectly defending an entity intertwined with one of Earth's most censorious surveillance regimes.

So far, we've just wasted time better spent differently, and with just as many news cycles as the Apple vs. Epic pay-per-view down the hatch. Suppose the gaming inquisition unfolds as the social one has. The proposed eviction of problematic foreign ownership results in mildly diluted holdings and Trump gets to lob a few more cloud contracts at political supporters. It will further entrench the power dynamic by informal precedent. Meanwhile, users have no fresh certainty about the web's future — just the wreckage of more embittered division over how to handle things in this vacuum of leadership.

♾️

An A-list of Apple's App Store opponents over the past few years have assembled a justice league of sorts against anti-competitive App Store policies, The Coalition for App Fairness.

The roster includes such iconic antiheroes of this soap opera as Epic Games and Spotify, and voices that lend a more reasoned air — like Basecamp and ProtonMail. I don't see Automattic on the list, but I hope that changes.

• In a minor PR stunt, Apple released some numbers on its App Store rejections and user review moderation process that are big in absolute terms, but fall a little flat on any relative and relevant measure if you go with the numbers in Tim Sweeney's napkin math.
• On a lighter note, iOS 14 has spent some time in the wild and it's no surprise that widgets have been the headline hit. The top 20 iOS home screen customization apps reached 5.7 million installs in the first four days post-release, and iOS 14 adoption is markedly further along than iOS 13 was at this point as users race to try them out. If you really want to eliminate all doubt that demand has been pent up, Pinterest broke its all-time daily download record on the back of users looking for iOS 14 design ideas.
• You're out of luck if you wanted to book in some of TSMC's 5nm chip production capacity — Apple has booked the lot of it for those forthcoming Apple Silicon machines.

We'll return to iOS 14 widgets later on. The classic annual reviews from MacStories and TechCrunch don't appear to have landed yet — though stories on the reason for their absence abound. The Verge has done a serviceable overview if you need a refresher on the new features.

♾️

• Microsoft announced it will acquire ZeniMax Media and its game publisher Bethesda Softworks. No wasting time while the paperwork goes through — this year's Doom Eternal will hit Game Pass on October 1st.

• Minority Report wasn't a suggestion, the EFF says. Technology can’t predict crime, it can only weaponize proximity to policing.

• Disinformation campaigns used to require a lot of human effort, but artificial intelligence will take them to a whole new level.

• Apple's Tim Cook says he’s been impressed with remote work and says it will leave a mark on how Apple operates, even after the pandemic. Self-evident statements, but Apple's appreciation for at least some aspects of remote is a signal other leaders will take seriously.

• The makers of Quora have brought us Telepath, a social network designed to be kinder. 

• Firefox usage is down 85%… despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up 400%.

• The first case of a fatality linked to a ransomware attack has been recorded after hackers attacked a German hospital.

• Microsoft's underwater data centre experiment has resurfaced, reporting a failure rate 1/8th smaller than that seen in the average land-based data centre.

• Wikipedia is getting a new look for the first time in 10 years.

♾️

Infamous-appropriator-of-free-speech-activism-for-the-purposes-of-shareholder-value-synergization-and-alignment Mark Zuckerberg (long title!) has shattered his faux-absolutism with a plan to censor his own employees.

Another time when Mark might happen to "accidentally" "just for a laugh" suspend your expressive, digital voice is if you are an environmental group. Double points on the Facebook Bingo scorecard for happening only a week after the company promised to do more about climate denial misinformation.

• For less flippant commentary on the leaked audio of Zuck on these matters, see Casey Newton's Mark in the Middle published in The Verge earlier this week.

• On a Casey Newton-related note, if you appreciated his analysis on the social landscape in The Interface, know that he's leaving The Verge to start a media company dedicated to covering social networks and their impacts called Platformer over on Substack.

• Facebook will soon let people claim ownership of images and issue takedown requests via its rights manager.

• Like your toddler threatening dinner refusal if you punish it for somehow smashing every antique chandelier in the house, Facebook says it will stop operating in Europe if regulators don’t back down.

• And the latest story to land in what's been another rough week for Facebook PR: Facebook’s former director of monetization says he had a role in making Facebook as addictive as cigarettes, and worries it could cause a civil war.

♾️

Versioning
Web development, design, and tooling

• Vue 3.0 is here! It's been a wait. There's a lot to get up to speed with. Go check it out.
• Chris Bongers has written a bit about his experiments with Webmentions, an open standard for gathering web reactions to content that is currently in W3C recommendation status. Pretty interesting — having a record of community interaction around an item is valuable, as is providing an easy entry point for newcomers to enter the conversation. Blog commenting systems are still terrible and nobody really wants anything to do with them. I'm looking forward to seeing how this shakes out.
• Swift 5.3 is here with a bunch of new developer experience and quality-of-life features. It's also swifter, as in more performant.
• GitHub CLI is out of beta. We did up a GitHub CLI usage guide in June if you'd like to get up to speed as quickly as possible.
• Panic announced Nova, a macOS native code editor that they might have called Coda 3 if it weren't such a complete remaking.
• The handy CSS Grid layout generator Layoutit Grid has just gone open source on GitHub.
• Spectre.css is a light, responsive CSS framework for fast, extensible development that comes in at just 10KB gzipped. That's worth letting out a hearty "crikey!" for.
• Learn about enforcing performance budgets with webpack over on css-tricks.
• date-fns looks like the front-running Moment.js replacement, but perhaps you'd also like to try Day.js, a 2KB alternative that uses the same modern API.
• Christine Dodrill has created a reference sheet to help the Go-proficient among you get up to speed with Rust faster, called TL;DR Rust.
• Size My Image is a neat little browser-based, offline-friendly tool for resizing images (surprise), changing formats, cropping, and exporting at various quality settings.

♾️

Logic Flow
Computing, customization, automation, and productivity​

After many years of doing not much with its multiplayer Excel clone, Google has built an Airtable clone. It truly is having its Ballmer era… just more profitably.

Needless to say, you should support the companies that pioneered this space because pouring more cash into monopolies is self-sabotage and because we all know Google will abandon this once it has had a crack at killing the other entrants you currently love.

As the TechCrunch piece says following its brief Airtable mention, and as far as I can see anywhere else, Google Tables' only serious differentiator is its integration with G Suite. Translation: "lol we can do what we want, we already own you."

Widget Wonders

• There are already plenty of apps available to help you customize your iOS widgets. Widgeridoo uses a block-based builder, while Widgetsmith starts with a preset collection that can be tweaked. Glimpse 2 allows you to use webpages as widgets, and Widgetly is another general widget customization option.
• Progress is interesting in that it's an app that exists solely to deliver a specific widget.
• If you're partial to writing a bit of JavaScript yourself, which I have reason to believe accounts for a few of you, existing and well-loved app Scriptable is your bet.
• Lest we forget that Apple Watch faces are shareable now, Watchfacely is a gallery for finding and downloading highly-rated submissions.
• MacStories has been tracking the best widget-enabled app updates coming out as developers scramble to catch up with the surprise iOS 14 release.
• Notable examples include Drafts, Todoist, Things, Fantastical, Wikipedia, Streaks, Soor, Lire, Apollo, and a new Twitter client called Aviary that I'd describe as really quite nice.

Everything Else

• You can now use a Nikon mirrorless or DSLR camera as a webcam on Mac. I think this just leaves the Sony Alpha mirrorless cameras without a desktop utility. Have a guess which brand I bought (no regrets).
• It's FOSS reviews Deepin 20, calling it one of the most beautiful Linux distributions based on stable Debian.
• Federico Viticci has put together WallCreator, an iOS Shortcut to easily create solid color and gradient wallpapers.
• Single sign-on solutions from the big tech companies offer convenience, and Apple's solution offers some very decent features to boot. But you should think carefully about whether you want to rely on them.
• Daynote is a simple, beautiful early access app that puts your journal, tasks, and notes in one place.
• Save to Notion, a third-party Chrome and Firefox extension that's essential if the official clipper's lack of tagging is too basic for you, has just added the ability to save a page's content.
• Todoist has just brought Kanban boards to its app in a bid to make a Trello extension to your system redundant.
• Just in case you had any doubts: you won't be able to use iOS 14's picture-in-picture with YouTube unless you're a YouTube Premium subscriber.

♾️

♾️

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:

• the SitePoint forums
• join our Discord server
• read new articles
• find remote jobs
• write for us! (paid)
• or via Twitter

Want to recommend SitePoint Weekly to a friend? Firstly: we love you too. Secondly: just share this link to our newsletter sign-up page, where they can sign up to receive new issues once a week.

Until next time,

👋

Joel Falconer
Managing Editor