Welcome to the March 2021 edition of web design and development. This month’s edition features Microsoft trying to become a monopoly in an attempt to purchase Discord. Two Tech companies have reached milestones and have celebrated big birthdays. As usual, it features a selection of posts in the design and development world. Enjoy!
Table of contents
Microsoft Wants Discord
Microsoft has recently been in the news and offered to buy Discord for a reported $10 billion. The tech giants want a stake in the Discord community which is popular with gaming and has a very large user-base. This could also further promote their own services including Azure Cloud hosting and also gain more popularity in Xbox purchases.
Some may fear that the discord they know and love will be ruined by Microsoft but after recent acquisitions including GitHub and Bethesda. The latter became bait to tempt users into purchasing the game pass. My favourite feature since Microsoft acquired GitHub has to be being able to have private repos for your code. This has enabled portability on different machines and speeded up user workflow.
The emphasis is on making money, so why would you make any drastic changes to something that works well? Will Microsoft gain the monopoly to further sway users to switch over to Xbox? We will have to wait and see!
Milestones in Tech
On the 24th March 2001, Apple released its operating system OS X Cheetah. Although quite buggy the OS introduced a dock, a pretty user interface and the file manager finder. Now 20 years later technology still remains a big part of the Apple ecosystem. Things have changed since then including the operating system being upgraded for free as back in 2001 you would have had to purchase it.
Jetpack celebrated its 10th birthday this March. Jetpack has helped, protect and speed up WordPress websites ever since. There are multiple plans available including a free tier that offers image hosting, sharing to social media, and protection against malicious attacks. The paid options offer Search Engine Optimization, advertisements, site search, online backups and many more.
Web Design Resources
The favicon has long been the image to display on your browser tabs. A 16 x 16-pixel image and a browser meta tag were all that was needed. Today there are different sizes to target different devices which can easily cause a headache. Perishable Press covers this in-depth article and requests that we should have 1 universal image that covers everything. I would also favour this and hopefully see this in the not too distant future.
If you are looking for SVG for your web design projects take a look at SVG Repo. The website contains a repository of more than 300,000 icons and vectors.
Flexbox has become a popular way to create CSS layouts on the web. It’s supported by all the modern web browsers and replaces old techniques that use floats. In the following tutorial, you will learn to build 5 flexbox layouts.
What was once manipulated by JavaScript has now been replaced by CSS transitions and animations. The following resource has an interactive guide into how to use transitions in your web design projects.
Coding Resources
If you are starting your programming adventures and find it difficult to start consider the following; breaking down your project into smaller pieces. If you are stuck for projects ideas check out JavaScript projects for beginners.
Google has announced the release of Flutter 2. The flutter framework allows you to build desktop and mobile apps using Google’s Dart programming language.
The Best of the Rest in March 2021
- Get started Coding with Java
- To 18 Python Pattern Programs You Must Know About
- Git Cheatsheet
- Kitemaker
- 15 Useful Web Development Tools That You Might Not Know
- Reactivity in Vue
- What is JavaScript – The Defiinition of JS
- JavaScript SEO Debugging Tools
- Svelte Quick Tip Connect a Store to Local Storage
- How to Build Programming Projects
See you in April for the next version of Web Dev and Design.