| Core Web Vitals, Webpack 5, iPhone Santa comes and goes, and gradients. Lots of gradients. No images? Click here SitePoint Weekly #11🍓 The freshest resources, stories, and exclusive content for web developers, designers, and digital creators. ♾️ Pointed Advice 🦾 A selection of our latest articles and tutorials Core Web Vitals are Google's metrics for evaluating real-world web performance. Craig's guide to understanding Google's chosen metrics will help you improve both your user experience and your search optimization. React Hooks was hailed as a revolutionary feature at release last year. They'll simplify your code, making it easy to read, maintain, test, and re-use in your projects. Craig introduces CSS options for setting up a responsive website, including media queries, Flexbox and Grid, and covers tools for testing cross-browser compatibility. An introduction to JSX, explaining how it makes development easier, and why you shouldn’t be worried about separation-of-concerns issues. Deven creates a basic ecommerce site with React, using React Context for state management, and adding a basic method for handling authentication and cart management. ♾️ The True Meaning of iPhone Event Season 🍕 Web development and technology links from around the web The Rundown
Technology news, society, and cultureIt’s a year ending in a number, so we had new 5G iPhone announcements, as well as the long-rumored arrival of a smaller and more affordable HomePod. You’re already on top of this, but it's all here, just in case.We also have the return of the MagSafe brand… but for phones. Laptops next, please.My iPhone XS Max feels like it did two years ago. 5G is available here, but 4G is plenty. While I like the design — clearly inspired by the iPhone 4, the best iPhone design — I don't feel any pull to upgade. That experience is near-universal these days: 9 in 10 people don’t see the point of buying the latest smartphones.The judge in the Epic case has permanently restrained Apple from blocking Unreal Engine, but won’t force Fortnite.How fun! Medium now actively bans multi-author publications from exporting their content. The towering mountain of highbrow clickbait shall not grow smaller.After allowing a worldwide anti-vaccination movement to grow at an exponential rate for a decade, Facebook says it will finally ban anti-vax ads. This is good. On the other hand, it's not doing anything about regular posts, and how much anti-vax community growth is likely to come from ads? If my total speculation is correct, not much. So when it says "it will still allow ads that push against government policies that promote vaccines” it’s not even addressing the most serious issue within this category.Proving that Facebook can make editorial decisions beyond ads when the posts consist of destructive and provably false misinformation, it will now ban all posts that deny or distort the Holocaust. Which is a great move, but also: come on, do the other wildly overdue things too.On the election misinformation front, Facebook and Twitter have today both rapidly restricted a post sharing misinformation about Hunter Biden. That’s progress — in high-stakes instances, Twitter has usually moved first and Facebook only hours or days later (or not at all)."It’s hilarious, students pretending to care where their data goes,” says Mike Olsen, CEO of Proctorio, a notoriously questionable remote invigilation service you should not be asking students to install on their own computers if you’re in education.Mike is the same man who posted student chat logs to Reddit a couple of months ago. And if that wasn’t enough winning for one person, his lazy presumption of student apathy outs him as unaware of the pivotal role of that demographic in getting results from political engagement and protest movements in spite of government opposition, from the Vietnam War to the modern day. One thing we can say for sure: Mike Olsen doesn’t care where student data goes, and students don’t get a choice when they hand it over to him.The US has joined six countries in a new call for backdoor encryption access, an outcome known as “theoretically the same as not having encryption at all” by everyone else. From the value of DRM to the war on drugs to almost any technology policy ever legislated, you can count on the governments of the world, as long as you're counting on them to screw up and not generally "counting on them."Researchers gave thousands of dollars to homeless people. The results defied stereotypes.Here's a real skin crawler. A smartwatch designed for children contains a backdoor that makes it possible to remotely capture camera snapshots, wiretap voice calls, and track locations in real-time.CO2 capture has been a non-negotiable requirement in any realistic plan for quite a while now. Problem: we don’t know how to do it. But we’re getting much closer, and spending to make it happen is rolling in by the billion. Better late than never.♾️
Versioning
Web development, design, and toolingWebpack 5 has been released. It’s a breaking change release and you can get all the details over on its blog.HYPERCOLOR.dev is a curated collection of beautiful premade gradients using default colors from the Tailwind CSS library.You can have a lot of fun with HYPERCOLOR and Tailwind CSS Play, a new advanced online playground for Tailwind CSS.This Eleventy Sass Skeleton Starter contains absolutely nothing beyond a base HTML5 template and the Sass essentials. Creator Stephanie Eckles also released this 11ty web component generator this week.Lara Hanlon of IBM Design shares 10 reflections on designing a design system.npmx is an advanced CLI interface for npm. Search for and install packages, run your project tasks, and take advantage of mnemonic keybindings, all from a very serious-looking ASCII interface.Interested in learning R, or getting into data science? Here’s Lydia Kajeckas on getting started with R, which was her first programming language.Bryan Cantrill thinks about his experiences with and feelings about Rust after the honeymoon, two years in.Check out Josh Comeau’s CSS Grid full-bleed layout tutorial.Learn how to add code highlighting to MDX and Gatsby.Learn how a different Joel set up his own personal CDN with Cloudflare and S3.These free Radix icons for extra-small designs look great.Chris Coyier shows you how to run Gulp as you open a VS Code project.The web has changed a lot since Hacker News was launched. One thing that hasn’t changed much since then: Hacker News. Bhanu Teja shares his hypothetical revamp of the orange site. 🔥 SPW Suggests Mailbrew is your inbox for everything. Replace browsing rabbit holes with your handmade daily digest. Fold up the rest of your newsletters there, too. And save the articles you find around the web to read later in Mailbrew so you're never hunting for the right bucket again. We're fans and users, so we arranged a huge deal for SitePoint Weekly readers this month — get an extended 30-day free trial, then 30% off any plan. ➤ Mailbrew: Your personal daily digest Logic Flow
Computing, customization, automation, and productivityThe traditional, annual iOS and iPadOS review by Federico Viticci of MacStories has finally landed for iOS 14.iOS Shortcuts expert Matthew Cassinelli has released Shortcuts Catalog – 600 pages covering all things Siri Shortcuts.WordPress can now turn blog posts into tweetstorms automatically. Good luck to you and your feed.Selfocus is a new Chrome extension for starting focused work sessions, and eliminating distractions, and keeping your daily goals top-of-mind.Uber has open-sourced the third release of Ludwig, its no-code machine learning platform.Readwise has just launched new customizations for the way your data is exported to Roam Research. You can now customize the page title, metadata format, highlight header, notifications about content sync, and see a preview of your formatting.Rejoice, all ye Spotify faithful, for the latest app update has brought iOS 14 widgets with it.Do you hate the intermediary visit to the Shortcuts app when using your custom iOS 14 icons? Why am I posing this as a question? Unless you’re a big user of system apps, you’ll be very happy with the Icon Themer shortcut on RoutineHub, which builds icons that go straight to your apps. ♾️ The Shutdown
That's all folks, but One More Thing... Do you want a pet, but know you're unwilling to tolerate things that defecate with reckless abandon? Do you want that pet to be open-source pet? You're in luck. Bittle is a palm-sized, powerful robot that can play tricks and was designed for agile maneuverability. Users assemble Bittle at home and can then load its Arduino board up with pre-made demos from GitHub, or start building their own. Can it love you? No. But there's a lot to be said for a pet that can't poop. ♾️ Connect with the communityWe'll see you in the next edition — in the meantime, connect with us for a chat through our various communities: the SitePoint forumsour Discord serverread new articlesor via TwitterWant to recommend SitePoint Weekly to a friend? Firstly: we love you too. Secondly: here's a link to our newsletter sign-up page, where they can sign up to receive new issues once a week. Until next time, 👋 Joel Falconer
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