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AI COLOR COMBINATION GENERATOR

This AI color combination generator uses AI color harmonies on the color wheel to generate beautiful color palettes.

DESIGN TOOL TIPS

This collection of Figma tutorials and experiments includes animations, modular illustrations, loaders, and special effects.

AN AI ASSISTANT THAT DOES THE BORING FIGMA STUFF FOR YOU

Mate is an AI assistant that automates tedious tasks like rearranging elements, creating color palettes, and renaming variables in Figma.

WINNING ISN'T FOR EVERYONE: NIKE DRAWS INSPIRATION FROM LEADING ATHLETES FOR ITS SUMMER CAMPAIGN

Nike's summer campaign, 'Winning Isn't for Everyone,' features insights from leading athletes like LeBron James and Serena Williams, highlighting the importance of determination and excellence. Narrated by Willem Dafoe, the campaign includes films, photography, and global advertising, encouraging aspiring athletes to embrace their competitive spirit and pursue their dreams.

POLAROID AND EAMES OFFICE UNITE TO RELEASE A SPECIAL EDITION CAMERA

Polaroid and Eames Office have collaborated to release the special edition Polaroid Now Generation 2 – Eames Edition camera, celebrating the innovative spirit of Charles and Ray Eames. The camera, which features a design made from 40% recycled materials inspired by the Eames' geometric patterns, includes advanced features like a self-timer, double exposure modes, and USB-C compatibility.

WOULD YOU LIKE A RECEIPT? THIS CLEVER CO-OP ANIMATED AD USES A PRINTER TO GET ITS MESSAGE ACROSS

Co-op's new campaign, "Owned by You. Right by You.," uses a stop-motion animated ad created with receipt paper to represent the cooperative model's lasting values. Developed by VCCP London, Blinkink, and director Sam Gainsborough, the ad highlights Co-op's ethical trading history and encourages greater consumer awareness of cooperative businesses.

DESIGNING THE OLYMPICS: WALLPAPER* INTERVIEWS JOACHIM RONCIN, DIRECTOR OF DESIGN FOR PARIS 2024

Joachim Roncin, Paris 2024 Olympics design director, discusses creating gender-free mascots, Eiffel Tower medals, and inclusive designs.

HOW FIGMA AI CAN SEE YOUR APP – HERE'S HOW TO STOP THEM

Figma AI offers advanced design features but raises privacy concerns.

THIS FORTNITE ARTIST QUIT TO DEDICATE HIMSELF TO MAKING SLIME IN UNREAL ENGINE

Asher Zhu left Epic Games to focus on creating realistic slime physics in Unreal Engine, founding Duck Shake Games to realize his unique game design vision.

HOOTSUITE: Q2 SOCIAL MEDIA BENCHMARKS

This report provides insights into social media performance across various industries based on data from 100 profiles per vertical. It includes metrics like overall impressions, audience growth rates, engagement rates, and posting frequency, averaged over a 30-day period. Although the sample size is small, the report provides a specific target for sectors to compare their performance. It also covers Instagram impression stats and Facebook and Instagram posting frequencies.

TIKTOK SHOP SPEND JUMPS DURING DEALS FOR YOU DAYS

5 UX TRENDS TO WATCH THIS YEAR

The top UX trends this year, including AI-generated content, real-time analytics, and emotional design, are all aimed at enhancing user engagement and satisfaction. The trend towards inclusive accessibility and seamless cross-app experiences reflects a broader shift towards more personalized and integrated digital experiences. Staying ahead of these trends is vital for businesses to remain competitive and meet evolving customer expectations.

HOW SIMPLIFYING A HOMEPAGE BOOSTED SIGN-UPS BY 9%

THE SMARTER-NOT-HARDER GUIDE TO CONTENT MARKETING

CHECKLIST: 18 THINGS TO CHECK BEFORE SENDING YOUR NEXT EMAIL

Even the best marketers send out email campaigns with silly errors. This post includes a proofing framework that covers a checklist of 18 items to do before sending your next mass email. Tips include clicking on every link incognito, checking the post-click journey, previewing formatting on all devices, and compressing images.

TOP RANKED APPS, UPDATED HOURLY

Appfigures ranks the top free and paid apps in every category and every country on an hourly basis. It includes apps from iOS App Store, Google Play, Amazon, Mac, Apple TV, and iMessage. App categories include books, entertainment, kids, and shopping.

GET A JUMP START ON HOLIDAY EMAIL MARKETING

Start early when preparing for the holiday email rush to handle the extended shopping season. Ensure your emails look good in both light and dark modes and test across devices. Gradually warm up your IP, increasing volume by 10-20% weekly to build a solid sender reputation. Segment your list to target engaged users using demographic and behavioral data. Validate your email addresses to maintain a healthy sender reputation. Continuously A/B test different elements of your emails.

HAS SOCIAL MEDIA MADE SIGHTSEEING DEEPLY UNCOOL?

WHEN UGC GOES WRONG: HOW SMART BRANDS REACT TO CONTROVERSY

Companies should prepare a crisis communication plan to use in the event that misinformation, misleading content, negative UGC, or hoaxes about the brand begin to spread online. Never attack an online user directly and only respond to a harmful message if it gets widespread attention first. When responding, consider the objective of your message and explain the “why” in your response.

HOW I OPTIMIZE LANDING PAGES FOR MOBILE DEVICES

Make your CTA buttons full-width, stack information vertically, reduce image size, and use easy to read sans serif fonts.

THE DEFAULT ADOPTION TRICK

Improve feature adoption by defaulting new functions to "on," making them instantly accessible and reducing the need for marketing campaigns.

THE 8 CONTENT POSTURES

Position your content by being the expert, storyteller, builder, and reporter.

STATE OF REACT 2023

The results of the 2023 State of React survey have been released. React is still the most popular web dev framework. React Server Components was the biggest change since React Hooks were introduced in 2018. Hooks has achieved widespread adoption, but Server Components requires deeper integration, so it may not see the same level of immediate adoption.

ANYONE CAN ACCESS DELETED AND PRIVATE REPOSITORY DATA ON GITHUB

Truffle Security found a huge security flaw on GitHub where deleted and private repository data can be accessed by anyone. The issue is due to GitHub's repository network architecture, which allows forks to retain access to commit data even after the original repository is deleted or its visibility is changed. This vulnerability allows attackers to potentially access sensitive information like API keys and private code.

CSS GRID AREAS

CSS Grid Template Areas lets you define your grid layout using named areas, making it more intuitive for complex layouts. It also simplifies creating responsive layouts by allowing adjustments to grid area definitions based on screen sizes. This article goes over the basics of CSS Grid Areas with lots of visual examples.

WILL FIGMA BECOME AN AWKWARD MIDDLE GROUND?

The current use of Figma as a middle ground for design might become obsolete as AI advances. AI will enable designers to quickly generate code from sketches, bypassing the need for vector-based tools like Figma. This shift will require a rethinking of design workflows, potentially moving towards low-fidelity, AI-friendly sketching tools that provide more structure for AI to interpret and generate code.

ASK HN: AM I CRAZY OR IS ANDROID DEVELOPMENT AWFUL? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

This developer is frustrated with the difficulties of developing a simple Android app to display a webcam feed. Despite having a working Python script for desktop platforms, integrating USB webcam libraries and dealing with compatibility issues in Android Studio has proven extremely challenging. They tried alternative solutions like Kivy and Beeswax but faced esoteric errors that were impossible to fix.

EVERY COMPANY SHOULD BE OWNED BY ITS EMPLOYEES

This article discusses Central States Manufacturing, a company owned by its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). This system allows employees to own a percentage of the company, which benefits them financially as the company grows. The author argues that ESOPs are the best solution to wealth disparity and is glad that more companies are offering ESOPs.

MASKA

Maska is a lightweight JavaScript library that allows you to create input masks without any external dependencies.

DOM TO SEMANTIC MARKDOWN

DOM to Semantic Markdown efficiently extracts web content for LLMs, preserving semantic structure, reducing token usage, retaining metadata, and enhancing LLM processing and reasoning.

ZEROX OCR

A fast way to OCR a document for AI ingestion. You can pass in a PDF URL or a file itself, which is then transformed and returned as Markdown.

ALEXA IS IN MILLIONS OF HOUSEHOLDS—AND AMAZON IS LOSING BILLIONS

Amazon's Echo devices have been a major financial drain for the company. The strategy of selling the devices at low prices, hoping to profit from downstream spending within the Amazon ecosystem, has not yielded the expected returns. Former CEO Jeff Bezos's focus on market share and rapid growth led to significant losses, which current CEO Andy Jassy is now attempting to rectify through cost cutting and monetization.

SOLVING THE OUT-OF-CONTEXT CHUNK PROBLEM FOR RAG

THE PUZZLE OF HOW LARGE-SCALE ORDER EMERGES IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS

This article explores the puzzle of how large-scale order emerges from complex systems, a phenomenon known as emergence. Researchers are developing a framework to understand this, suggesting that emergence arises through a hierarchical structure of independent levels, akin to "software" running on the natural world. This framework uses computational mechanics to identify criteria for emergent systems, analyzing them across different scales, from neural networks to urban landscapes.

NODE ADDS EXPERIMENTAL SUPPORT FOR TYPESCRIPT

Node.js has added an experimental flag called --experimental-strip-types that transpiles TypeScript source code into JavaScript source code.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS TAUGHT ME HOW TO WRITE ALT TEXT

This author learned to write effective alt text describing scenes in Dungeons & Dragons and engaging image descriptions for accessibility.

A NEW PATH FOR PRIVACY SANDBOX ON THE WEB

Google is proposing a new approach for Privacy Sandbox on the web that elevates user choice by allowing users to make informed decisions about third-party cookies.

ALTERNATIVE TEXT IN ACTION

Alt text allows people with visual impairments to understand image content.

META RELEASES THE BIGGEST AND BEST OPEN-SOURCE AI MODEL YET

Meta has released Llama 3.1, its biggest open-source AI model yet. The company claims it outperforms GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. The largest version has 405 billion parameters and was trained with over 16,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. Meta is making its AI assistant available in more countries and languages and adding a feature that can generate images based on someone's likeness.

APPLE'S FIRST FOLDABLE IPHONE COULD ARRIVE IN 2026

Apple's first foldable iPhone could arrive in 2026. It is rumored to fold horizontally, similarly to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip. The phone is now in development with suppliers. Apple is still reportedly working to flatten the crease that appears when the phone is unfolded. Next year's iPhone is rumored to have a mechanical aperture that will let users achieve a depth-of-field effect.

IS CULTIVATED MEAT FOR REAL?

While the cultivated meat industry is releasing increasingly optimistic projections, well-informed commentators remain skeptical. It is difficult to make cultivated meat at affordable prices and at a large enough scale to compete with conventional animal products. Cultivated meat is possible, but it will take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. In the meantime, companies could pursue cheaper products that combine cultivated meat and plant-based components.

CHINESE RESEARCHERS CREATE FOUR-GRAM DRONE THAT MIGHT FLY FOREVER

Chinese researchers have created a solar powered drone that weighs just over four grams. It uses an electrostatic motor that weighs just 1.52 grams and is powered by solar cells that produce 4.5V. Its design has a lift-to-power efficiency two to three times better than that found in traditional drones. Adding batteries to the drone would make it capable of 24-hour flying operations.

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SOFTWARE ENGINEERS ARE NOT (AND SHOULD NOT BE) TECHNICIANS

Great software engineers automate repetitive/manual labor. Most large software engineering organizations incentivize anti-automation due to their desire for predictability. Predictable work is work that could have been automated but was not automated. The more predictable and routine a developer's job is, the more they tend to slide into becoming a technician. Teams that get into predictable flows are likely ignoring a promising opportunity for automation.

WHERE SHOULD VISUAL PROGRAMMING GO?

We shouldn't try to replace all code with visual programming but instead only add graphics where it makes sense. Most visual programming environments fail to get any usage because they try to replace code syntax and business logic, which developers never try to visualize. Developers visualize things like state transitions, memory layouts, and network requests. Those working on visual programming would be more likely to succeed if it started with aspects of software that developers already visualize.

INSIDE THE 78 MINUTES THAT TOOK DOWN MILLIONS OF WINDOWS MACHINES

Businesses around the world experienced outages starting shortly after midnight on Friday. This was caused by a faulty update to CrowdStrike's Falcon security software, which is used widely in Windows machines to prevent cyber threats. The update exposed a massive flaw in the company's product that could have been easily avoided. The issue could have been prevented if CrowdStrike had properly tested its updates with a small group of users and rolled out the update gradually, a fairly standard practice in the industry.

ASK HN: IS IT POSSIBLE TO MAKE FAANG SALARIES WITHOUT WORKING THERE? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

The gap between FAANG and non-FAANG salaries can be quite substantial. While it is possible to make FAANG-level salaries elsewhere, these opportunities are usually in less well-known companies that rarely hire. Most of these jobs also require some kind of specialty. The finance industry pays well, but the job will likely be more stressful. One other option is to learn how to build a business rather than optimizing to being a well-paid employee.