Three picks a day
Trends
Interpretations of what is moving in development and design.
- AppAndroid Studio: Pick Your Own Coding AgentAt Android Dev Summit, Google said Android Studio now runs more than 40 coding agents of your choice. This follows its announcement through code review, terminal tools and performance analysis.
- BrandApple's October Event: a Touchscreen MacBook ProAt its Pro and tell. event on October 28, Apple revealed a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, two days after an OLED iPad mini. This gathers the scene from two design outlets.
- WebAwards Racing, the FWA-Winning Browser Game, ExplainedA look inside Awards Racing, a browser racing game where you smash design-award icons. Physical objects are drawn with two calls a frame, and the first visit downloads about 23 MB.
- Service review/dev/null, the developer network 12,000 have joinedWe looked at /dev/null, a social network only for developers, through its public screens and news coverage. The feed is a Log, posting is a Commit, and every post carries a commit hash.
- App reviewDraw Music, the app that turns drawings into songsWe looked at the Android app Draw Music, where a doodle becomes music, through its store page and user reviews. Here are the good parts and the ad complaints.
- AppFive behaviors that changed in Expo SDK 58Expo SDK 58, the toolkit for building iOS and Android apps with React Native, is out. These are five changes from its release notes to check before you upgrade.
- WebPlushies Turns AI Helper Cursors into Plush ToysA look at Plushies, a library for soft 3D characters in Three.js. It ships 17 shapes and a separate package for AI helper cursors. It is still an alpha release, so this post is an observation.
- AutomationTrying AI Design Skills, a rule pack for coding agentsThe GitHub repository AI Design Skills, with 10,166 stars, gives AI coding tools a set of landing page design rules. Here is how to install it, how it is used, and two samples built from two prompts.
- WebAnimaxxing teaches coding agents GSAP motionAnimaxxing is a set of agent skills for building animated websites with GSAP, introduced in a Codrops tutorial. Here is a tour of the demos on its official sites.
- Design systemdesigma, a free Figma alternative in Rustdesigma is a free, open-source design tool written in Rust. Its repository is barely two weeks old and already has a thirteenth alpha, and it opens Figma and Pencil files.
- WebNext.js v16.5 canaries keep fixing cachingNext.js shipped the stable v16.4.3 and five v16.5.0 canaries this week. The stable release is a small bug-fix backport, while the canaries are mostly about caching and Turbopack.
- AppTauri v2.12.5 updates its Windows installerTauri v2.12.5, the framework for building desktop apps with web technology, is out. It fixes two Windows installer bugs, and its CLI release fixes an error and answers three security advisories.
- AppGoogle now publishes Android guides that AI agents can readGoogle has published more than 20 Android skills for coding agents. The repository gained 1,070 GitHub stars in a week. This post sets out what app teams should take from it.
- Design systemTry DSUI right nowA signature pad, hold to confirm, an elastic slider and generative UI, among others. See dsui for yourself, with its themes, blocks, MCP server and skill.
- Design systemFigma auto layout now behaves like CSSAuto layout, text wrap, spacing and opacity now follow the way CSS works, and code layers and Specs arrive on the canvas. Here is what design system teams should check.
- AutomationWho is OpenAI GPT-6.1 Terra forOpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra, a mid-range model. Here is where a team that automates repetitive work could use it.
- AutomationFour things to check before you upgrade to n8n v3.0n8n, the workflow automation tool, shipped v3.0 as a pre-release. Here are four things from the release notes to check before you move.
- Design systemRadix's dialog parts get 60 million weekly installsA look at the basic-parts layer that runs quietly under design systems, through the Radix Primitives 1.6.7 release and two weekly download figures.
- Design systemWhat is leaving in Storybook v11 alphaStorybook's 11.0 alpha has shipped five times, and what stands out in the notes is removal, not new features. Here is what a design system team should check.
- AutomationNo rush to upgrade to Vercel AI SDK v7Vercel's AI SDK shipped patches for v7, v6 and v5 in the same week. The release notes list only dependency updates, but they still give a basis for timing an upgrade.
- WebLighthouse now shows the browser support of web featuresLighthouse can now report the Baseline status of what a page uses. It is a good moment to check which libraries the browser already replaces.
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