U and I

Flashdance General web Hooks [hooks.events] pushes desktop notifications via JavaScript, cURL and Swift. It does cost US $9, though a free version exists that allegedly sends you updates about the Justin Bieber song “Baby” every 30 minutes (seriously, that’s what it says on the site). Flashlight [github] is an unofficial plugin system for OS X Yosemite’s Spotlight. Plugins are built in Python and some existing plugins involve instant access to Wolfram Alpha and the terminal. laroux.js [github] is a jQuery substitute for “modern browsers”, with compactness as a key goal. Google has released a Node.js client for its cloud platform services [github], offering access to Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Datastore, Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud Pub/Sub. Meanwhile, Microsoft has open-sourced server-side .NET and expanding it to run on Linux and OS X [news.microsoft]. Here’s the GitHub repo [github].

U and I Design Material-UI [github] is a CSS framework and collection of React components adopting Google’s Material Design spec. It’ll be interesting to see how influential Google is in this space. Atomic [atomic], focussed on creating interface design software for designers, is certainly worth keeping an eye on. Zeplin [zeplin] is a collaboration app for UI designers and front-end developers, it’s currently in private beta, but is also worth signing up to and keeping track of.

Meeting of the Minds SitePoint First up on SitePoint for today: Remember that “Introducing Carrot” parody video? Apparently it has a lot to teach us about product creating and crafting product videos, If This Then That is an excellent automation tool for anyone to streamline their lives, but it’s even better now that it can be used to automate your WordPress blogging. Meanwhile, we take a look at meetings: Are they the worst, or just kind of terrible? Then there’s this piece on 5 obsolete features of HTML5, essential reading for anyone who’s lost track of the spec’s evolution. We also launched a new course on Learnable, our learning platform,introducing jQuery to those who've yet to give it a spin. Check it out!

Spaced Out News/business Humanity landed a space probe on a comet [nytimes] (pics). Humanity landed a space probe on a comet [vox] (an explanation, and pics). Humanity landed a space probe on a comet [xkcd] (an awesome cartoon). High-fives all round, everyone. DoubleClick, Google’s ad service that powers the ads on sites like the BBC, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and the Mail Online, went down for over an hour yesterday [businessinsider], an outage estimated to cost publishers “US /$1 million an hour”. No biggie. YouTube is making a play into streaming music subscription services, announcing YouTube Music Key [youtube-global.blogspot], an ad-free music service with background streaming, offline capabilities. Android Lollipop has been pushed out to Google’s Nexus phones and tablets, and other smartphones, like those made by Motorola, are also getting the update. Here’s an exhaustive review of the impressive new OS update [arstechnica].

Passable Off-topic Instagram users can now have all the pics they uploaded to the service printed onto a massive poster [myyearprinted]. #blessed Your daily reminder that people are kind of terrible: Beautiful iOS game Monument Valley released an expansion this week, but you have to pay a couple of dollars to unlock it, so naturally everyone is flooding its App Store page to complain [toucharcade]. Finally, in case you thought all cybercriminals were computer geniuses with impenetrable security, the guy behind the hack of security think tank Stratfor used his cat’s name as his password [arstechnica]. Uh, what an idiot! *nervously changes passwords*