Hot New Web Dev – March 2024

Welcome to Hot Web Dev March 2024, featuring the latest technology and web development news. March has been a busy month with women worldwide celebrating International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day, here in the UK.

Although it’s just another day I enjoyed being cooked for both days. Back in the technology world, March has seen a big buyout with an interesting future together. You will find the regular learning and coding resources and our tool of the month is a cross-platform terminal. Happy Easter folks.

Table of contents

Canva Acquires Affinity
Learning Resources
Coding Resources
WOW Tool of the Month
The Best of the Rest in March 2024

Photo by Alena Koval on Pexels.com

Canva Acquires Affinity

This month Canva, an online design and visualisation platform, bought Affinity, whose standalone graphics application rivals those of Adobe’s, for a much affordable budget. As a user of both Canva and Affinity for several years, it is in an interesting buyout.

Currently, Canva is a subscription model and Affinity is a license model so this leads to many questions for all of those, including myself, who have an Affinity license for their suite of products including Designer, Photo and Publisher.

The companies both issued 4 joint pledges encompassing the vision of Affinity and Canva.

1. Fair Pricing

With both companies offering different licenses, the perpetual license will remain for Affinity users and they will continue to be affordable. You can still purchase a license for Affinity and use the subscription model for Canva. There could be an option to have a more flexible package to suit Canva users if they wish to adopt Affinity products and vice versa.

2. Accelerating Affinity

New features will be rolled out for Affinity users. Currently in the pipeline are variable width font support, blend and width tools, auto object selection and ePub export.

3. Accessible for All

The Affinity suite will be made available, without charge, to schools and registered non-profit groups. More than 600,000 charities and non-profits already benefit from this with many more students given the opportunity to hone their skills in design.

4. Community Led

The community will be shaped and guided by feedback from users. Both have a vision to listen to their customers and improve the tools available.

From a personal point of view although I don’t class myself as a graphics expert. I have always favoured Canva and have used it for many years and I like the suite of tools that Affinity provides. They are far cheaper than their rivals and far easier to use for a novice like myself. The future is promising.

Source

Affinity & Canva Pledge | Canva News

Learning Resources

Microsoft offers free certification courses in Python, GitHub, and 365 Fundamentals and focuses on the cloud with Azure.

Are you building a server-side application using JavaScript? FreeCodeCamp has a comprehensive 14-hour free NestJS course covering the basics, databases, authentication, testing and much more.

Coding Resources

Being a web developer in the modern day is indeed harder than ever. Whether frontend, backend or fullstack the lines between them are often changing and what was predominantly frontend has now morphed into fullstack with frameworks such as SvelteKit.

With increasing expectations of developers and an overwhelming choice of libraries, frameworks and toolkits to use backend development is harder than 20 years ago.

JavaScript promises is the modern way of doing asynchronous calls to prevent callback hell. It wasn’t wrong, although it continues to confuse many years after developers adopted them. If you are a visual learner you may find the visualizations of promises easier to understand.

WOW Tool Of The Month

Developers spend a lot of time using the command line and generally, the software built-in to the OS is limited and bland. Warp is a terminal with a difference. Its main features are terminal-based editing with IDE quality and an integrated AI feature that helps with commands.

Warp Drive helps save workflows, making you more productive and enabling efficient teamwork. Built using the modern Rust programming language, the themeable terminal is currently only available for Mac and Linux but there are plans to release it for Windows and the Web.