SitePoint Weekly – 1 October 2020

🍓 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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Alexa, Is the Dystopia Here Yet?

🍕 Web development and technology links from around the web

The Rundown
Technology news, society, and culture

Plenty of new announcements from the megacorps this week, including announcements from Amazon...

• Starting with the creepiest: Amazon subsidiary Ring announced a drone security camera that zooms around your house, keeping an eye out for baddies for you, and an eye on you for Jeff.
• Amazon has gone spherical with these new Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Dot with Clock devices.
• Luna is Amazon’s cloud gaming service to compete with xCloud and Stadia.

• The big tech companies are never great at reading the room, and Amazon has introduced the ability to pay with a wave of your palm, rich with biometric data as it is, over scanners in its stores.

And in Mountain View...

• Google announced new phones: the Pixel 5 and the Pixel 4A with 5G.

• The Chromecast Ultra is being replaced with a new device called Chromecast with Google TV, which is $20 more expensive, has a full on-board UI, and comes with a remote. Looks set to compete more directly with Fire and Apple TV devices.
• There’s also a sequel to the original Google Home, the Google Nest Audio, which places more of an emphasis on sound (it wouldn’t take much to beat the original speaker).

• A new Google Assistant feature, ‘Hold for Me,’ waits on hold so you don’t have to.

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Just Platform Things

• Just like oil leads to global warming, big data leads to social cooling. An interesting site that lays out the consequences of our data addiction in a way that’s accessible to the less technical.

• A judge has proposed taking the Apple vs Epic case to a jury trial. It also seems that Epic is paying for some of its shadier maneuvers with pushback from the judge.
• John Gruber has made some claims about Epic being an unreliable narrator, flagged as misleading here with some supporting evidence, but who cares? Look where Spotify got after years of making arguments The Right Way.
• If it weren’t for big, bold, Jobsian maneuvers we’d still be sitting around pretending that it’s normal for one of the world’s most dominant computing platforms to control all software access and extort obscene percentages on every single transaction driven by third-party value.
• Some of Facebook’s most vocal critics are tired of waiting for its independent oversight board — so they’re starting their own.
• After a judge rejected a request from TikTok content creators to delay the ban, another one granted an injunction preventing the ban for the time being.
• A leaked surveillance company manual has explained how to keep Facebook from detecting and removing fake accounts.
• Google is cracking down on apps that have been skirting the Play Store’s 30% cut. While 30% is an absurd take on any platform, Google’s own article begins by noting the importance of app store choice and the availability of such choice on Android, which has the benefit of being both true and a significant differentiator compared to Apple. What a monumentally high bar we’ve set for our tech in 2020. All hail the proprietary hellscape.
• DuckDuckGo has been eliminated from the Android search preference menu thanks to the auction model set up as an EU antitrust remedy, which DDG points out is fairly ridiculous.

Points of Interest

• The source code for Windows XP was leaked online this week, and turned out to be the real deal too.
• Twitter is bringing its ‘read before you retweet’ prompt to all users after a successful trial.
• A Swiss team has created tiny, fluid-filled channels in microchips to spirit away heat and save energy. Given how close to thermal limits we’ve been playing with available technology, this could be a game-changer.
• If you have kids and they are anything like mine, they have been playing the hell out of Among Us, and with quite a bit of accompanying chatter too. This has caused mobile Discord installs to take off – check out the hockey stick graph.

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Versioning
Web development, design, and tooling

• SitePoint author Joe Previte shows you how to build a Discord bot with Rust and Serenity on the Facebook Developers blog.
• Mono talks about building a workflow to generate an icon font package.
• Learn how AssemblyScript can help you write WebAssembly-compatible code if you already know TypeScript.
• Learn how to work with Python virtual environments.
• While we’re talking Python, you can use it to start modding The Sims 4. This will be the perfect backdoor to get my daughter interested in coding!
• Xiaru Li shows you how to implement passwordless authentication with Next.js, Prisma, and next-auth.
• The 2020 State of Prototyping industry report is a global survey that explores the rapid rise of the prototyping discipline globally.
• Here’s a gentle introduction to using a Docker container as a dev environment.

Total Tools

• visx from Airbnb is a collection of expressive, low-level visualization primitives for React.
• Svelte just keeps on growing up, with a burgeoning gaggle of little frameworks to call its own. Elder.js is a new opinionated, SEO-focused Svelte framework.
• Apple has open-sourced Swift System, a Swift library for low-level systems interfacing.
• colors.lol provides overly descriptive color palettes. Sensible palettes are paired with quite nonsensical names, such as “snail-paced soft pink” for #FDB0C0.
• Tails is a copy-and-paste library of templates and components crafted using TailwindCSS.
• Earthly is a build automation system for the post-container era.
• fflate is the fastest and smallest pure JavaScript compression and decompression library.
• The Doist design team has created this Apple Widgets UI Kit for Figma. High quality as you’d expect and everything you need to start design iOS 14 and Big Sur widgets.
• Abstract provides APIs to automate a whole bunch of utility functionality that all sorts of developers will find useful, from email verification to IP location.

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Logic Flow
Computing, customization, automation, and productivity​

• Everyone is still going wild for iOS 14 icons, from Product Hunt to TikTok!
• Phoneicons is a list of free and paid iOS 14 home screen icons.
• icons8 has posted numerous themed collections.
• But customico is probably one of the best deals at the moment, at US$6.99 for over 10 color schemes.
• Homescreens is a weekly newsletter featuring interviews with founders and creators in tech about how they use their phones.

The Foggiest Notion

• Niftyman is a macOS app that gives you quick menubar access for multiple Notion pages.
• Quick Note is a quick capture app for Notion that instantly launches a blank notepad that is synced to Notion. It’s a $4.99 iOS app, which is modestly handy but a bit rich. I got excited thinking it was a desktop app. One major weakness of basically all new wave tools in the category from Notion to Roam: the lack of omnipresent, native-fast quick capture tooling.
• The Drafts-to-Notion integration bound to come shortly after the Notion API arrives is basically the quick capture dream here, at least if you’re stuck in the Walled Garden.
• On that note, where is the API? Notion recently said it was coming ‘this quarter’, which just ended. With faith in the coming of the API being a holdout issue for many of us, this is terribly thin ice for poor communication.
• A curated list of Notion apps, tools, and resources.
• The Notion community workspace just added its own template gallery.

• This handy Python script for desktop organization will watch the desktop for you and, with a bit of tweaking, move files off to a more appropriate file depending on filetype.
• The TechCrunch review of the Apple Watch Series 6 is here, suggesting it’s a decent improvement but not a big upgrade draw.
• Loot.social is an online tool to download photos and videos from Instagram and Twitter.

Our favorite Linux rice this week: Lines by szorfein is a Gentoo config running Awesome window manager and Xst terminal. We've been showcasing a lot of pastels and a few monotone setups so far, but I have a soft spot for that cyberpunk color palette.

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Until next time,

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Joel Falconer
Managing Editor