Cool Links

Great and to-the-point article with practical examples of when to use (or not use) animations properly in UIs.

I love me some whooshy animations, but they can be a pain in the ass when overused or when used in the wrong moment.

This is a really cool initiative! Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year and I’m really happy with how they’re aiming to stop AI slop from taking over their (still great) search results.

In my experience, their results are miles ahead of Google’s, Bing’s or whatever other search engine out there, partly because of their algorithm prioritizes good sites, partly because they allow you to prioritize/deprioritize/block the sites you want.

But a good algorithm only goes so far and with the amount of AI slop hitting the web every day, it’s gonna be harder and harder to avoid them. Now Kagi users can report certain articles as AI-generated so other users can know that beforehand and not click on them, or even block their domains.

The “div vs button” debate was never really a debate because one of the sides is objectively wrong, but this is still a good post to remind you of why it was never a debate in the first place.

Thomas gives a bunch of examples of things you should avoid doing if you want your website to look good on Safari’s new Liquid Glass design. All those don’ts are perfectly illustrated by a website that didn’t take Liquid Glass into account… apple.com.

The new Safari is such an incredible failure.

Yes! Any good developer will tell you that coding is the easiest part of the job. Making software actually go beyond a feature demo is what’s really hard. It’s something I’ve been taught ever since I began working on the field, actually. Learning to code is essential, but learning where to put the code and how to foresee all the hundreds of complexities is my actual job.

Expectations, feature scalability and security are very much human components of the job and can’t be properly done by something that’s not human.

Okay, this is pretty cool. This lil’ website allows you to do quick image edits right on your browser. Nothing new there - except for the fact that it actually works with no account, no ads, no popups, no upsell. Truly a marvel!

The same as Edit Photo, but for Videos!

Another cool little web utility. This one lets you squoosh your image files to greatly reduce their file size without any significant loss in quality. Especially useful if you have a website of your own and want to optimize your images.

Really cool thoughts on the tradeoffs between control and performance in web development, and how whatever you build will never outperform the browser’s built-in APIs.

A really fun web comic of an artist explaining his thoughts about AI art. I think I agree with all the points there.

This is beautiful. This Obsidian plugin completely overhauls the file navigation and makes it actually usable. It fixes one of the app’s biggest problems for me: navigation.

You can add custom icons to folders as well, which I used to need a separate plugin for.

A really cool CSS gradient generator that supports all the new CSS color stuff that’s been coming out in the past years (and that I honestly don’t know much about).

Aside from the cool UI and easy-to-understand code it generates, it can generate HDR and SDR gradients; which means that on supported browsers and devices, your gradient might pop out with higher dynamic range (and have the SDR as a fallback). Great if you really want the colors to pop.

Grab your headphones and get ready to lose some hours. This website compiles every subgenre of music and algorithmically sorts them out in relation to one another. It’s great to learn about new genres you might like or to find something similar to what you already know!

Adrift is a quiet space where doubts become paper boats and drift together across a shared sea.

What a neat lil’ website. You can write your own doubts or self-care notes and let them float out in a virtual sea, alongside the notes of many others. There’s some background music too.

Make individual choices that make your life better. Take collective action to make society better.

Cory has such a nice way with words — he can express complex thoughts so simply.

This one is a banger. It’s both encouragement to do more against evil and reassurance for when you feel like giving up.

This tool looks pretty cool! It’s a two-liner solution for web apps that automatically highlights accessibility issues on whatever you’re working on.

I haven’t tested it myself yet (busy month), but will definitely look into it soon.

Neat short article that goes over a bit of the differences between ems and rems in CSS, with nice examples.

I think it’s widely known that the JS dev community relies too much on dependencies, especially through npm packages, and that it’s really hard to avoid this problem (I use as few packages as possible, but each dependency has its own hundreds of dependencies which also have hundreds more…).

But I think I never stopped to think of how easy it is to publish a package there. Which also means, it’s too easy to publish a malicious or compromised package, that gets downloaded and executed on our computers with no proper vetting. Scary.

… is just to be alive.

Beautiful reminder of why chasing goals and meaning only leads us away from them. A bit related to my longterm goals post from last year.

One of capitalism’s greatest successes is that it’s robbed us of imagination.

We struggle to imagine what life could look like under a different system. How it would be better. How it would be worse. How it would be different.

Utopias don’t exist. They never will. But I refuse to accept this system we toil under—while better than monarchies and fiefdoms—is as good as it gets.