SitePoint Weekly – 17 September 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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World of Workcraft

🍕 Web development and technology links from around the web

The Rundown
Technology news, society, and culture

It's announcement week for a couple of companies you've heard of before.

Apple: Apple Watch Series 6, iPad Air, Fitness+, & Apple One Bundle

• Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 6, which will measure blood oxygen levels.
• This is neat: Family Setup will let you manage multiple Apple Watches from a single iPhone. There are a bunch of things about the Watch that are legitimately helpful for kids who may not be ready for a phone.
• Apple announced a new iPad Air that looks like an iPad Pro and will work with the Magic Keyboard (which costs over half the price of the US$599 iPad Air itself).
• Apple is retiring from the rat race to start a yoga studio, except the yoga studio is called Fitness+ and Apple has no plans to retire from the rat race.
• The Apple One subscription bundle brings Music, Arcade, iCloud Storage, TV+, and News+ under one payment. A pretty decent discount for you, big gains! in services revenue for Apple.
• One thing remains consistent, which is that Apple is not doing a good job at DevRel lately. Apple surprised iPhone users with a next-day iOS 14 release. App developers are pissed.

Amidst it all, Spotify said that the Apple One bundle is a 'threat to collective freedom'. As much as I've been consistently grumpy with Apple since The Beginning of the Newsletter, my soft spot for Spotify has worn away over the years.

Spotify has failed to capitalize on a number of the concessions they've gained from Apple. The Watch app and Siri integration are half-baked, even considering the limitations Apple imposes. I actually switched to Apple Music, which pays slightly higher rates to artists and allows me to pretend my HEOS/Sonos Frankenstein is not totally ridiculous, while I moved all of my in-app subscriptions to direct developer relationships.

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Facebook Connect: Oculus Quest 2, R.I.P. Rift, & Your Virtual Office!

• Facebook announced the Oculus Quest 2 with an entry cost of US$299. The Verge says it has a great screen and price but comes with a bunch of downsides, such as a cumbersome design and a Facebook sign-in requirement.
• It's also the end of the road for the Rift. The Rift S is being killed off with the launch of the Quest 2.
• Facebook announced a virtual office experience called Infinite Office. I haven't tried this, but it's hard to imagine VR tech has come far enough since the first Rift, which gathers dust on my bookshelf, for this to be even remotely appealing.
• Also: why are we continuously trying to replicate office paradigms in a remote work world? It's bizarre. Leave it behind already. It's like pouring your liquor store wine in the bathtub so you can wade barefoot in it and get your fix of medieval, bacteria-infested stompfestival.

Probably the biggest news of the week, even if not the sexiest: NVIDIA will acquire Arm for $40 billion. This puts Intel in quite a position. It's hard to feel good about an Intel CPU purchase right now, given Ryzen pricing and performance. Apple is phasing its Intel silicon right out of the product line. And NVIDIA, which has become an unstoppable force in recent years, is about to apply a new kind of pressure. At least in 2021, it's quite unlikely that there'll be Intel Inside for most of us.

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• “I have blood on my hands”: a whistleblower tells BuzzFeed News that Facebook knew about and ignored global political manipulation.
• The TikTok saga is still a wild, neverending ride. After a near-sale to Oracle (???), China indicated it may kill TikTok’s US operations rather than see them sold. But the latest reports suggest TikTok may IPO globally instead if Trump approves a deal where Oracle and Walmart own minority stakes in the company. And that particular if is always the least predictable one.
• Apple will not let Epic Games re-apply to the Apple Developer Program for at least one year. It is also still making ridiculous, hyperbolic arguments, as it has in every preceding App Store debate — though not quite to these heights. Also: "they're only doing it for attention."
• Google Groups is finally leaving its Google Classique styling behind in favor of Material Design.
• Is the vaunted cloud acceleration falling flat?
• Amazon Alexa for Landlords is dystopia incarnate. This product, designed to be built into apartment buildings, comes from the same company that recently appointed a former NSA chief to its board. The one in charge during the Snowden disclosures, to be precise.
• Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ads. Few are buying it.
• We mentioned the DoJ preparing to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Google recently. Now the FTC is reportedly working on one against Facebook.
• Over 1,000 parents sign an open letter protesting facial recognition in schools. I would definitely encourage my children to leave their faces at home should this became widespread.
• A Berkeley study says 90% carbon-free electricity is achievable by 2035. Naturally, NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has pledged to go 100% renewable by 2030.

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Taking on Audible's Audiobook Monopoly

You may have seen this Fast Company article on the author taking a stand against Amazon's audiobook monopoly. That author is Cory Doctorow, who we've featured in recent issues for his important anti-monopoly work.

Cory famously makes digital copies of his books available for free — even with Creative Commons licensing. It's how I started reading them in the early 2000s as a uni student, trackpad-on-iBook instead of iPad or Kindle. Now he's using his upcoming book launch, Attack Surface, to demonstrate the viability of self-publishing audiobooks without giving in to Audible's mandatory DRM policy.

If you want to check out some copyleft infopunk fiction that comes recommended by Neil Gaiman and Edward Snowden, you can grab a DRM-free copy of many of Cory's books on his site — classics to try include Little Brother, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Eastern Standard Tribe.

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Versioning
Web development, design, and tooling

Age of the Denosaur

Deno 1.4 was released this week, bringing a number of significant changes with it, including a web-standard WebSocket API, a flag to auto-restart running scripts on file change, and integrated test coverage.

• Take a look at denopack, a CLI tool and plugin collection for bundling code to be used with Deno.
• Interested in picking up Deno? Our growing collection of introductory material is a click away — read our getting started guide and find an index of the rest once you get to the end.
• Need help with something that's not there? Let me know and we'll sort you out.

Jammedstack

If you recall Matt Mullenweg's controversial comments on the Jamstack, there's been plenty of time for the responses to roll in. Brian Rinaldi of JAMstacked does a great job of rounding up the best from Netlify, Stackbit, Chris Coyier, and others.

For what it's worth, we're both bullish on the Jamstack and grateful for the 20 years of accessible publishing WordPress has enabled. SitePoint moved to Gatsby (with headless WordPress) in April, and we have no regrets.

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• The legendary Rachel Andrew has published a guide to CSS masking on web.dev. 
• Add these fun randomly-generated characters to your apps and games with Bigheads, via React library, SVG, or image. This would make a neat user-customizable avatar generator.
• BGJar is a free SVG background generator for your projects.
• Anyfiddle, according to the tin, is JSFiddle for any language. Start coding with pre-built templates for Node, Laravel, Django, and more.
• AVIF has landed — a new image format derived from the keyframes of AV1 video. It's a royalty-free format, and it's already supported in Chrome 85 on desktop.
• Here's a guide to handling typography when designing a Material Design theme with Figma. 

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Web accessibility is critically important. Sometimes sites are built with the best intentions but ultimately poor accessibility because it's hard to imagine how disabilities change the user experience if you don't have one.

That makes actively seeking out the perspectives of disabled people important — whether through friendship and discussion or resources online. Holly Tuke has written a great article on the 5 most annoying website features she faces as a blind person each day. It's a great insight into common UX nuisances for those who browse with a screen reader.

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You can level up your productivity in a major way with Vim commands in Visual Studio Code. The Vim learning curve is quite famously a cliff (... never mind the gruesome scene at the bottom).

SitePoint author Joe Previte has built the perfect active learning kit for turning those commands into muscle memory — exit instructions included. It's a $10 digital download, but good value and very effective.

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Logic Flow
Computing, customization, automation, and productivity​

Mailbrew, one of my favorite tools of 2020, is one major step closer to being the place to manage all of your content consumption with the addition of Read Later functionality and, to start, a Chrome extension.

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Roam Research has taken $9 million in funding on a $200 million valuation (this is a lot more than most seed rounds, i.e. 25x more).

• This could fuel faster, better product development, or it could be another interesting tool that turns into a mediocre mass-market product due to exit pressure. Always a gamble!
• However, I have heard one of the investors (Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison) be intelligent on podcasts. That is the vaguely-optimistic, tenuously-related sign you can feel free to cling to for dear life.

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Material Shell is a modern desktop interface packaged as a GNOME Shell extension. It's designed to improve productivity by simplifying navigation and reducing the need to manipulate windows.

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As everyone's been telling you, coronavirus remote work is not normal remote work. I've been working from home for 15 years, and 2020 is the first year I started to causing myself issues by staying seated at the screen for too long. I used to wonder what the point of the Apple Watch's 12 one-minute stand goals was. Who needs this? I understand now. Boy, do I understand. But I digress.

WFH Wakeup is a tool for Mac and Chrome that hopes to get you taking more frequent, more active breaks. It'll keep you on a proper break schedule, and make sure you do some functionally useful movements with that time.

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• Your ‘surge capacity’ is depleted, and it’s why you feel awful.
• Command is a mobile browser (iOS/iPadOS) for thinking — tab decluttering, highlighting, annotation and tagging, and even memory retention features.
• Airtable announced the Airtable Marketplace, allowing users to make their tables do more, and opening up the platform so that everyone can contribute apps.
• Dawn is an app for iOS that brings calendar events, todos, and reminders together in one minimal, beautiful interface.
• NoCodeAPI 2.0 connects your Google Sheets, Airtables, Telegram, and all sorts of other application APIs, no backend required.
• The Notion Web Clipper is pleasantly snappy, but you can only add a title and select a database. This means lots of piles that need to be sorted at some point. One Redditor with an image editor handy has suggested a better way. I, for one, am as invested in this as the API.

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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