Journalism

Ever since the $20 billion Figma acquisition in September, there has been increasing interest in the cloud IDE market. The thinking is, if even design tools can become web-native, then surely it is high time for developers to move to fully web-based tooling. After all, even Photoshop — once thought to be incapable of shifting … Read more

Sizzy is pitched as a “browser for web developers,” and its creator, a Macedonian developer, known simply as Kitze, is hoping to turn it into a thriving business. Currently, the product is available on a 14-day free trial, but after that, you’ll need to sign up for a monthly subscription ($15 per month for an … Read more

Headless content management systems have turned the traditionally staid CMS market on its head over the past few years. In a headless CMS, the frontend (aka the head; meaning presentation and publishing) is decoupled from the backend (the content) and managed outside of the core system. WordPress vendors like WP Engine now put headless offerings … Read more

“It reminds me of the feeling when Netscape first added JavaScript to the web.” So says Matthew Hodgson, the creator of the Matrix network and now building a web-based metaverse client called Third Room. He thinks he and his team have cracked the solution to creating user-generated content (UGC) for the metaverse. Last August I … Read more

Aurora is a popular name for tech projects, it seems. Following on from Amazon Aurora and Twitter Aurora, Google’s Aurora project is a collaboration between its Chrome browser team and open source web frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt and Angular. It was announced last June, and at the recent Infobip Shift developer conference we received … Read more

Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is one of a number of 3D development engines competing in the thriving online gaming sector — not to mention the nascent metaverse market. Unlike its more well-known counterparts, Unity and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, O3DE is open source. It began as an Amazon product with a typically terrible Amazon name … Read more

“StackBlitz is very much the development analogy of what Figma did for design,” StackBlitz co-founder and CEO Eric Simons told me in an interview. Today, StackBlitz is announcing a new GitHub integration product called Codeflow, along with what Simons says is a “strategic investment from Figma,” which began just weeks before Figma was acquired by … Read more

It’s been over two years now since Twitter resurrected its developer API as “version 2” and optimistically welcomed back all the third-party developers it had rug-pulled at the end of Web 2.0. To find out what progress Twitter has made with its API v2, I caught up with Amir Shevat, Head of Product for the … Read more

Shawn Wang, aka @swyx, is a feature of the developer conference circuit and also has a knack for making thoughtful, forward-looking projections for web technologies. His latest theory is that we are about ten years away from developers dropping desktop files completely — it’ll be “the end of localhost,” according to Wang. To find out … Read more

Last week I attended the Infobip Shift developer conference, in the lovely coastal city of Zadar, Croatia. The speaker list was top-shelf and popular topics included cloud integrated development environments (IDEs), generative AI, modular blockchains, and using CSS to create books. The Shift Conference was started in 2012 by Ivan Burazin and acquired in January … Read more

When news broke of Adobe acquiring the web-based collaborative design tool Figma for about $20 billion — one of the most significant internet M&A deals over the past twenty years — you could almost hear the anguished cries of web designers the world over. Their collective response was best summarized in a brutal tweet by … Read more

It’s a milestone week for blockchain technology, as Ethereum moves from the environmentally damaging proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to the energy efficient proof-of-stake (PoS). In a project nicknamed “the Merge,” Ethereum will first bring together the two consensus mechanisms, and then drop PoW completely once PoS has taken over. The Merge is predicted to complete … Read more

A Canadian startup called Wonder Interactive is creating a platform to turn Unreal Engine apps into HTML5 apps, which it claims will have “near-native performance and lightning-fast load times.” To find out why an Unreal Engine developer might want to create a browser version of their app, I spoke to the founders, Robert Stewart and … Read more

The metaverse has largely been promoted in 2022 as a potential successor to the consumer internet — certainly, that’s the vision Meta (née Facebook) is pitching, but it’s also true of dozens of blockchain-based metaverse projects (like Decentraland and Voxels). However, there are also various flavors of enterprise metaverse projects emerging. One of the first … Read more

If the metaverse is to become a reality, then avatars will be a crucial building block for developers. Even better if those avatars are interoperable — meaning, able to be used across different virtual worlds and online games. One company early in the race to provide a platform for interoperable avatar technology is Ready Player … Read more