Latest Console newsletter

A weekly digest of the best developer tools. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don't have to. This is the content of the newsletter sent on 22 Jul 2021.

Interesting tools

Each week we review 2-3 of the most interesting developer tools. Here's what we featured this week. View the full archive.

Polypane

Browser testing tool.

What we like: Multiple browser panes side-by-side to test various sizes. Inspect element works across panes simultaneously. Scroll sync helps comparison. Built on Chrome so devtools available. Shows Web Vitals scores. Can trigger media features e.g. prefers-color-scheme, reduced-motion. Debug tools like a11y, CSS injection, disable images, mobile reachability.

What we don't like: Signup/license key process is a bit fiddly. Quite CPU intensive. You need a very big screen to see all the windows properly.

automerge

Conflict-free JSON-like data structure.

What we like: Built for JS applications to allow read/write to properties whilst avoiding conflicts. Maintains a history of all changes. Network-agnostic but includes a sync protocol for send/receive messages. Custom types for conflict free counters, collaborative text editing and tables. Follows the idea of functional reactive programming.

What we don't like: Documents are not actually immutable by default - you just code as if they are. Enforcing this can be turned on but has a major performance hit. Implementation is only in JS but versions in Rust, Swift, Python in various stages of development.

New betas & early release programs

We also include some of the more interesting beta and early access releases. Here's the ones we featured this week. View the live list on Beta Console.