Hello
Due to some personal events the last week was kind of a roller coaster ride. Life seems to throw it in your face all at once, sometimes. Professionally, I was switching gears between sending out a proposal for a potential new client – which I would really love to work with – and working on some projects that are in the finishing stages as well as finally investing more time and money into the marketing side of picu. Looking forward to get things off the ground.
Frontend Development
🖋️ Free Faces
I love beautiful type and could spend (ok, ok – I often do spend) hours looking at fonts. This site collects font-faces that are available for free and displays them in a beautiful way.
🧐 Using Defensive CSS with StyleLint
Daniel Yuschick explains how they made the switch to using defensive and logical CSS together with StyleLint to throw errors or even enforce the rules where appropriate. I just recently started playing around more with linting and other automatic testing and look forward to introduce this to our codebases in the future. This article gave me a good introduction to stylelint and some of its possible custom options.
Daniel Yuschick – Linting defensive and logical CSS with Stylelint plugins
WordPress
🎁 New in June 2023
Just now finished reading up on lots of the newest developments in WordPress. One thing I really look forward to are “synced Patterns” as this is something I could have used quite a few times before. Basically, this will let you have a pattern that has a synced layout/design options, but let the content be editable. When I first heard that reusable blocks will be renamed, I thought it’s a weird decision, but from that viewpoint it absolutely makes sense. They are all patterns. Some are synced design wise, some completely synced and exactly the same on all pages and some are more like little “templates” that you can use and abuse however you like. I like this a lot!
make.wordpress.org – What’s new for developers? (June 2023)
🛝 Adam Zieliński on how he prototyped WordPress playground in a week
WordPress Playground is one of the most impressive things that came out recently. It runs WordPress in the browser using something called WebAssembly (or WASM) with no MySQL database. Here the lead dev, Adam Zieliński, writes about how he built the prototype for it in a week.
Adam Zieliński – WordPress Playground was prototyped in a week
🛝 Plugin: Playground Embedder
The WordPress Playground is very impressive and can be used in various ways. We’re actually thinking about how we could use it to demo some of the features of picu or even picu Pro on our website. Joost De Valk built this handy plugin to easily embed a playground on your website. Looks handy!
GitHub – jdevalk/playground-embedder
🤖 Building forms with AI “magic”
Interesting to see all the different applications where AI is being introduced to make a product easier to use. Here WS Form integrated OpenAI into their forms plugin to generate forms from a prompt. Impressive, especially if you think about how young all of this is and where this will be in a few years.
WS Form – WS Form Unveils AI Generated Forms
Other
😜 Google Bard is available in Europe
Until now, Google’s AI Experiment “Bard” was only available in the US (I think?) but they finally launched it in Europe, which means we can try it out in Switzerland without any VPN-tricks. I tried it out with a coding related question and the answer wasn’t really good. Had asked ChatGPT the same question a few hours earlier, which answered it perfectly fine. No matter how “representative” the result of my initial test was, I guess it’s always a good think if there’s some competition.
Oh, and I also asked it about our own company, and learned that we had a third co-founder, built haptic feedback systems and were acquired by Microsoft in 2016 (the real date of our foundation).
✍️ Stable Doodle
Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, released another tool, which lets you generate images from rough doodles in different styles.
Hope you have a good week.