Hot New Web Dev – June 2023

Welcome to Hot Web Dev June 2023, featuring the latest web development. This month features the latest version of Svelte. We look at scams/AI scams and how the young are falling for them. An update on Platform X, the OnClick situation. The web tool of the month will help you create beautiful documentation to go with your wonderful app.

Table of contents

Svelte 4.0 Released
Falling for Scams
Coding Resources
OnClick Updates
Web Tool of the Month
The Best of the Rest in June 2023

Svelte 4.0 Released

After four years since its last release, Svelte 4 has been released. Although the latest edition doesn’t have any breaking changes it is merely a maintenance release in readiness for the Svelte 5. The changes increase performance, using the minimum required version of Node 16.

Svelte 4 uses fewer node packages by nearly 75% which increases the speed when using NPM. This results in the dependencies being reduced from 61 to 16. The official website has also been overhauled and is now split into multiple pages with improved navigation, typescript docs and a better-performing REPL.

Sources
Svelte.Dev

Falling for Scams

I’ve seen and reported a few scams on this blog over the years. Here are a few:

It was interesting to find that even the young are becoming victims of popular get-rich-quick schemes which can use tactics to promise big profits within a short period of time and will also require a small investment. Cryptocurrency rings a bell here.

Being young in the online generation as well as technologically savvy can also be a negative. This can make you overconfident that you can spot a scam but with professional scammers at the helm, you are never truly safe.

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

Remember websites can be scraped and built rather easily to fool people into thinking they are legitimate. To combat being targeted reduce the exposure of your habits by reducing your digital footprint.

Romance scams have taken an AI route. I love Artificial Intelligence and everything it can do but be aware of it being used by criminals. Whether it uses AI art generators to create fake profile pictures, uses bots to create authentic-looking profiles or uses voice cloning techniques, you may want to switch back to the olden days when speed-dating was a thing.

Source

MakeUseOf – Reasons Why Young Tech-Savvy People Fall for Scams

Unveiling the Deceptive Techniques: How Criminals Exploit AI in Romance Scams

Coding Resources

TypeScript continues to become more popular, especially if you are coming from a statically typed language such as Java. This brings up the frequently asked question should I start with TypeScript or learn JavaScript first?

Although I cannot answer that question for you I find that learning the basics of JavaScript first may come in handy but it can also lead to utter frustration when it comes to null or undefined variables. If you come across the latter then TypeScript will help you out immensely. Here are a few articles to help you out.

TypeScript vs JavaScript: Why Should You Learn TypeScript?

Converting JavaScript codebase to TypeScript

Typescript Made Easy: Simplifying the Shift

OnClick Updates

It’s been a little quiet over the past month with emails from OnClick Pro/Academy/Platform X. As expected this didn’t last! The website must have been down for a little while but is now up and running and the false promises are coming back. Now using a different email to distribute the spam they are selling a 2023 Insane package worth $5000. All for $49. Interesting! Please feel free to share your stories.

Web Tool Of The Month

The web tool of the month will help you create documents for your app or service. It may sound boring but Starlight is built on top of the hugely popular Astro, a static site generator (SSG). As with Astro, you can integrate libraries such as Tailwind and even include components from your favourite front-end frameworks like React or Svelte.

As for the markup you can use Markdown, Markdoc and MDX. By default, it includes site navigation, search, internationalization, SEO, dark mode and more. Currently, it’s in early beta so there may be bugs but with a strong framework behind it, it’s going to kick ass!