Top picks — 2024 September
End of September! Shocking how quickly time goes. This month for me passed like a blink of an eye, probably because of a pretty intense family holiday and a crazily busy time at work. Nonetheless, I managed to come across a few interesting bits around the web, so I would like to share them with you, as I have done for the past years on every last day of the month. And as always, a little music recommendation nugget from my collection just for you. Enjoy.
Album of the month
My friend from Poland recently released a new album. “Homey Moon” by Plash is very different from anything else he has produced before. Other than the usual very bboying, drum-heavy beats, this one includes some bits of house, jungle, and tons of obscure samples. Absolutely sick production from soup to nuts!
Top picks
CSS @property and the New Style
This article by Ryan Mulligan is a great explainer of the powerful @property at-rule. It is a very practical guide as it presents the power of a feature in practice to build a pretty trendy call-to-action button. I must admit that the button looks absolutely stunning!
Oracle, it’s time to free JavaScript.
JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle. It is a side effect of Sun Microsystems’ acquisition in 1995. Also, it is a very abandoned trademark that should not belong to Oracle, but rather to the public domain. Ryan Dahl, Brendan Eich, and plenty of other well-known contributors to the JS ecosystem put this petition in place to free up the trademark for the most popular programming language.
Animate to height: auto; (and other intrinsic sizing keywords) in CSS
This is absolutely crazy that things that were impossible without a bunch of JavaScript a while ago, are now single-liners of CSS. Animating height and other intrinsic sizing keywords is as simple as smashing one line of code to the root. Bramus explains things in a great level of detail.
MODALZ MODALZ MODALZ
That’s right, we use too many damn modals! I am guilty of it myself. This is a pretty website that gives a number of reasons why we should seek a different design pattern instead of blindly smashing modals on top of modals.
Consider Slowing Down When Switching Password Managers
With the announcement of the latest Apple iOS and macOS operating systems, for the first time ever I am considering moving away from 1Password. The new native Passwords app offers almost everything I use 1Password for, with very few exceptions that I can mitigate using password-protected notes. For sure, you can expect an article about the transition when it is done, but for now, one of the authors of the Passwords app, Ricky Mondello, gives a little advice about the transition and offers two strategies.
Launch of Social Web Foundation
I disappeared from Facebook and Instagram ages ago. I kept my Twitter (X) account for some reason, but every time I visit this page, I struggle to believe my eyes at this shitshow that is happening there. Luckily, there is a future for social media platforms that are based on open standards. The Social Web Foundation is here to educate about the new open standards, popularise them amongst the general public, and improve the apps and protocols involved.
Leaders of the open social networking movement have formed the Social Web Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to making connections between social platforms with the open standard protocol ActivityPub.
New Values and Functions in CSS
The first Public Working Draft for the CSS Values and Units Module Level 5 landed, and it brings a lot of exciting features. Some of them are absolute game changers. Alvaro goes through them one by one. I am most excited about the attr() function and calc-size(), but I can’t wait to see what CSS magicians will do with random().