Downlink – Real-time satellite imagery on your desktop

Downlink is a Mac App that will give you real-time satellite imagery on your desktop. You’ll be able to watch sunlight and weather patterns as they move across Earth.

It includes the ability for you to pick how often the images are updated (from every 20 minutes​ to every hour) and you can choose from 8 different views of the Earth.

You can get Downlink for free on the Mac App Store.

Beehive

Beehive is an event and agent system, which allows you to create your own agents that perform automated tasks triggered by events and filters. For an easier description, it’s like an open source Zapier or IFTTT.

Here are a few examples of things Beehive can do:

  • Re-post tweets on your Tumblr blog
  • Forward incoming chat messages to your email account
  • Turn on the heating system if the temperature drops below a particular degree
  • Run your own IRC bot that lets you trigger builds on a Jenkins CI
  • Control your Hue lighting system
  • Notify you when a stock’s price drops below a specific value
  • Plus many more.

It has a whole lot more integrations or hives as they call them, to give you a vast amount of options and flexibility.  Beehive is written in Go, and the GitHub project includes everything you need to get started using this including a prebuilt Docker image.

 

Taskbook – Manage your todo’s from the CLI

Taskbook is an open source tool that allows you to manage tasks and notes right from your terminal. Here is how they describe the tool:

By utilizing a simple and minimal usage syntax, that requires a flat learning curve, taskbook enables you to effectively manage your tasks and notes across multiple boards from within your terminal. All data are written atomically to the storage in order to prevent corruptions, and are never shared with anyone or anything. Deleted items are automatically archived and can be inspected or restored at any moment.

Once installed you use a tb command to fire off the app and use a simple syntax to create and manage your tasks. For example, to create a new task:

tb -t Improve documentation

Where I feel this breaks down a little is when you want to complete a task. You’ll need the task ID and then use a -b flag. For example,​ this would complete task 3:

tb -c 3

For those that live in the terminal all day this tool is worth checking out. You can find complete details and installation instructions over on GitHub

Tailwind CSS V1

Tailwind CSS just released v1.0 to great fanfare. It’s not often a new framework comes out that is both useful and a joy to work with, but Tailwind is that.

In fact, this very site is running Tailwind with WordPress and it’s been a joy to use and the more you use it the easier new projects became because you memorize the naming patterns. It’s definitely a tool I recommend and if you haven’t used​ it yet, give it a try on a real-world project before forming an opinion if you love or hate it. I didn’t get the benefit until I gave it a serious try.

Hyper 3

Hyper 3 is now out and the focus of the release was to make it really fast. It also includes emoji support and many new themes.

One of the main reasons Hyper 3 is so fast was due to the WebGL Renderer:

The renderer is the piece of code that draws actual pixels on the screen based on the state of the terminal. The original Hyper renderer was based on the DOM. While that was a flexible approach thanks to CSS, it was also very slow.

Hyper 2 improved upon this by switching from hterm to xterm.js and using its canvas-based renderer. While that made Hyper 2 faster, for Hyper 3 we knew it was possible to deliver even faster performance by completely rewriting the renderer with WebGL. By fortunate coincidence, as we were still figuring things out, Daniel Imms (from xterm.js and VSCode fame), just returned from a “vacation” where he happened to be write a shiny new WebGL renderer.

Isn’t the open source community just amazing? We immediately merged Daniel’s branch onto a test fork, and well, it ran circles around Hyper 2.

For more details on this release and for all the details check out their announcement page.

GitHub adds notifications for Gists

GitHub announced support for notifications on Gists and it allows you to stay on top of comments and reply from your email. This new feature will be useful so that you don’t have to manually check back on Gists to see if anyone has commented. 

Once you’ve subscribed to a Gist you should see comment notifications on the GitHub notifications section of your account and these can also come in an email if you have that setting turned on.