The Web world is changing very fast and sometimes it is hard to keep up with the latest news, events and tools. To help you keep on track we aggregated the most interesting moments of July for web designers and developers.

Battle For The Net Neutrality

Hundreds of companies participated in huge online protest on July 12 against the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) plan to damage net neutrality and give big cable companies control over what we see and do online. More information on battleforthenet.com

Adobe Announces to Discontinue Flash in 2020

As HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly open standards evolved and replaced flash functionality, flash became unnecessary. And Adobe decided to discontinue Flash by stopping updates and distribution at the end of 2020. More information on blogs.adobe.com

What's New In DevTools (Chrome 61)

DevTools of Chrome 61 newest features and changes:

• Mobile device throttling simulation.
• Storage usage.
• Cache timestamps.
• Enable the FPS Meter from the Command Menu.
• Change mousewheel and trackpad behavior in the Performance panel.
• Debug ES6 modules natively.

Find out more about DevTools new changes and features on developers.google.com  

New Editor for the WordPress Mobile Apps

On July 24 was introduced a new editor for iOS and Android, codenamed “Aztec.” It works faster and smoother. It’s main features and changes are:

• Improved scrolling
• Faster image insertion.
• Reliable spell checking.
• Undo and Redo functions.
• Dictation.
• Full support for accessibility technologies like iOS’ VoiceOver and Android’s TalkBack.

Read the full article on blog.wordpress.com

Announcing Ghost 1.0

Ghost is an open source publishing platform, that powers blogs and online magazines. Since first release on 2013 Ghost had 99 iteration releases and on 27 of July 2017 came out 100th release - Ghost 1.0. Find out more about the new and exciting Ghost features on blog.ghost.org   

New Social Icons Widget for WordPress

This July WordPress released a new social media widget. Which supports over 40 social platforms and it offers three icon sizes: small, medium and large. More than that, this widget has a drag and drop feature where you can just drag and drop links and rearrange them. Read the full article on blog.wordpress.com

Abstract - Git for designers

Working in a design team has it’s downside - it can easily get complicated, especially when a group of people uses and changes the same files. Abstract solves that problem by applying version control. And multiple designers can work on the same file without fear of overwriting changes other designers make. Read more about Abstract on hackingui.com

Social Media Posts scheduling from WordPress.com

Now Premium and Business plan users of WordPress.com (and Jetpack Professional and Premium users) will have access to a new Advanced Social Media feature. It will allow you to schedule and automate content sharing on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Read the full article on blog.wordpress.com

Firefox Focus for Android Hits One Million Downloads!

Firefox Focus is a privacy centered mobile browser that blocks ad trackers and can erase your browsing history, including passwords and cookies. From the launch on June 20 Firefox Focus for Android was downloaded more than one million times. Read more about Firefox Focus new features on blog.mozilla.org

Image source: blog.mozilla.org   

Front end news - reproCSS

We just discovered an interesting project on Github by Tommy Hodgins - reproCSS. It is a flexible CSS reprocessor which uses <style> tags. repoCSS allows interpolating JS inside CSS with the ${} syntax. Read more on https://github.com/tomhodgins/reprocss

Google launches SOS Alerts

Google is launching a new feature called SOS Alerts. It will highlight emergency information on Google Search and Google Maps if natural disaster or other crisis strikes. In Search, Google will show overview of the situation and helpful information such as emergency phone numbers, relevant websites and updates from local officials. Google Maps will show emergency information too, plus real time traffic information if any blockages on the road occur. Read more on techcrunch.com  

Google’s AMP and PWA replaces Responsive Mobile Web

Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and PWA (Progressive Web App) technologies revolutionize mobile commerce industry. Using these technologies together allows to develop significantly faster mobile sites than usual responsive mobile web.

Read full article on forbes.com  

Wordmark.it New Version Launch

Helps to choose fonts by quickly displaying text you want with your fonts. Designed and built by Fahri Özkaramanlı. Check it out at Wordmark.it

eBay will let you shop with just a snap of a photo

eBay announced two new features “Find it on eBay” and “Image Search”. Find it on eBay will allow you to share images from social networks or websites with eBay and get a listing of that item or visually similar items. Image Search will allow you to take a photo (or use a photo from your phone) and use it to find similar listings on eBay. Read more on www.ebayinc.com

DomFlags tool for creating keyboard shortcuts to DOM elements

DomFlags is a chrome extension that offers a new way of interacting with DevTools. It works like bookmarks for DOM elements and allows you to quickly navigate through the DOM tree using keyboard shortcuts. Moreover it has an auto-inspect function that helps you re-engage elements allowing you to style web pages even faster. Read more on domflags.com

We hope this blog post was interesting. You are welcome to share it. We will try to make this type of post as a month periodical on our blog. If we missed something important please notify us in the comments.