Joe Sweeney built Podrain to scratch his own podcast-listening itch. Here’s what he had to say about it in our community chat:

Hi there! Huge fan of Changelog. I actually built a podcast client for the web as a Vue PWA, as a proof-of-concept towards building a web-first future away from app stores. Works fully offline with downloaded audio, as in, works in Airplane mode (but on Android only). Interface is rough but it’s pretty stable and improving over time!

Try Podrain yourself by pointing your favorite web browser right here.

If you plan on using Tailwind and building with React or Vue (or Alpine coming soon), it’s a no-brainer to start with these free UI components by the Tailwind team.

Rick Nolan:

Evan You is an independent software developer and the creator of the open source JavaScript framework Vue.js. We had a chance to speak to Evan about the release of Vue 3, his opinion on no-backend & fullstack approaches, Vue.js use cases and the work-life balance of the creator of the technology.

An amalgam of interest on this week’s episode starting with a peek at what’s finally coming in Vue 3. We talk about the process of change in the Vue ecosystem and what interesting features are coming either very soon or not for a while depending on how you view time right now. Then, the panelists share what they’ve learned recently, and finish off with shout outs to the projects, ideas, and people we’re appreciative of.

This Smashing article is a nice introduction to Tauri, which was news to me as well. It tells you why you might want to use Tauri instead of Electron, how to get set up for Tauri development, and how to build a Vue-based desktop app with the framework.

Evan You writes up lessons learned from rewriting the next major version of Vue.js.

Two key considerations led us to the new major version (and rewrite) of Vue: First, the general availability of new JavaScript language features in mainstream browsers. Second, design and architectural issues in the current codebase that had been exposed over time.

I found the section on overcoming the bottleneck of the Virtual DOM (and decreasing CPU time by up to 90%) fascinating. ASTs FTW once again!

Node 14, Vue’s Vite, and is-promise are in the news. We’ve got some working from home tips and unpopular opinions to share. And… shout outs! 👏

Lj Miranda:

I made a website that generates cute 8-bit avatars using Conway’s Game of Life. Simply type in your name, and it will create a unique sprite just for you! Try out the changelog, jerod santo, or adam stacoviak!

Conway’s Game of Life is something that we consider as a Cellular Automaton. It was a mathematical model created by the mathematician John Conway, who, unfortunately, passed away a few weeks ago due to the coronavirus. I highly encourage you to know more about Conway, he’s such an interesting and unique individual!

Built with Vue and Python. Source code here.

I like the why behind Matestack:

Implementing two separate systems (backend-api, frontend-app) is a pain: Two different code bases, two repositories to maintain, two different deployment schedules, two test environments, two everything… Being a small dev team, we decided not to adopt this modern web development complexity and decided to create… Matestack!

If you have 30 minutes and want an easy button to learn all about it, Jonas Jabari gave a talk on it at Ruby Unconf 2019.

Crater is free for life with all of the below features catered towards the freelance and small business community.

This looks really polished. It even has a React Native-based mobile app. That’s a lot!

Built with Vue. Play with the live demo right here.

From Yaser Adel Mehraban on getting started with Vue.js.

Vue.js is an approachable, versatile, performant, and progressive framework to build user interfaces with. This core library is focused on building the view layer only. It uses the goodies of Angular (such as template syntax) and React (such as Virtual DOM) and adds a few more enhancements on top.

… Another bonus point of it is that migrating to it is really easy. You just need to add a script tag to your page and you’re good to go.

Jerod, Divya, & Suz get together to discuss top-level await, the JS13kGames winner, Liran Tal’s is-website-vulnerable, Vue 3’s source code, and Facebook’s take on AR/VR/XR. Plus 3 awesome pro tips you don’t want to miss!

n8n (a numeronym for “nodemation”) is a node-based workflow automation tool. The reason for the square quotes around “open source” is because it has a Commons Clause attached to its Apache 2.0 license, which means you can do anything you want with the source code except make money with it. Since n8n itself is built on open source tech such as TypeScript and Vue.js, this is a nice touch by the author in the FAQ:

As n8n itself depends on and uses a lot of other Open Source projects it is only fair and in our interest to also help them. So it is planed to contribute a certain percentage of revenue/profit every month to these projects. How much exactly is not decided yet.

Vue-next is in “pre-alpha” condition, but the team has achieved most of the architectural goals and new features planned, so the source is now public on GitHub. No word yet on when they expect Vue 3 to be officially released, but you can at least dig in to what they’ve got so far!

{
  "How to use": "Paste your JSON here and press Ctrl+Enter to format!",
  "Help": "Check the console for errors if it fails to parse.",
  "Themes": "Toggle dark/light theme with Ctrl+B",
  "Share": "Print a shareable URL to the console with Ctrl+L",
  "Source": "View the source on GitHub at https://github.com/kritzware/json",
  "Info": "Press Ctrl+I at anytime for a reminder of these instructions"
}

Built with Nuxt.js.

[XSM] consists of a global store and the machinary to re-render the component when the state is updated. The store is just a JavaScript object with key and value pairs. By binding the instance reference, this, to the store, each component can react to the changes of the store whether it is re-render or unmount. It is really this simple, no need to use HOC, provider, reducer, decorator, observer, action, dispatcher, etc. Hence, all the three most popular framewokrs work the same way in XSM and that’s why we can keep the code size very small and support the three frameworks without framework specific modules.

Works out of the box with Angular, React, and Vue.

This is not another “setting up” a new project with Vue and TypeScript tutorial. Let’s do some deep dive into more complex topics that are usually not covered but are totally required in real-life projects.

Real life data on how Google indexes javascript-rendered websites today. This has been a controversial subject, and this article by no means settles it entirely, but provides some strong data for what types of dynamic content are well indexable and which are not.

Though to be honest, I think the most important conclusion the author makes might be this one:

If you need your site to perform on search engines other than Google, you will definitely need pre-rendering of some sort.

KBall and Nick catch up with Nara Kaspergen and Jen Looper for a pair of conversations covering Voice UI Devices, using NativeScript for mobile development, and Jen’s work with Vue Vixens helping make the Vue.js community welcoming to women and non-binary people.

A new static site generator baby is born. It’s highly inspired by Gatsby.js (React based) but built on top of Vue.js

If Gatsby intrigues you, but React isn’t your thing… check out Gridsome. It has the same concept of a universal GraphQL for all of your data sources.

Hot on the heels of Rails’ announced rich text editor comes tiptap for Vue, which is built with Prosemirror. But what does “renderless” even mean?

With renderless components you’ll have (almost) full control over markup and styling. I don’t want to tell you what a menu should look like or where it should be rendered in the DOM. That’s all up to you. There is also a good article about renderless components by Adam Wathan.

That’s a great idea as long as you provide some default/swappable rendering for folks who just want to get started quickly. Full demo of tiptap in action right here.

Just visit web-riimote.herokuapp.com on a laptop/desktop AND a smartphone. Your smartphone will be the controller and your laptop/desktop will be the main display.

You don’t have to install an app or anything. Pretty cool! Video demo here.

A searchable and ranked collection of the best Vue.js libraries. Inspired by Ruby Toolbox and built with Vue (duh) and Rails. Have a Vue project that’s not on the list? Tweet @vuetoolbox and they’ll get you added.

Good news — the next generation of Vue CLI, the standard build toolchain for Vue applications, is here. Evan You writes:

Vue CLI 3 is a completely different beast from its previous version. The goal of the rewrite is two-fold:

1. Reduce configuration fatigue of modern frontend tooling, especially when mixing multiple tools together;
2. Incorporate best practices in the toolchain as much as possible so it becomes the default for any Vue app.

This means that any Vue CLI 3 project comes with out-of-the-box support most of today’s preferred ways to build and ship applications.