Glucomate is your iOS companion app for recording, tracking, and monitoring blood glucose. From Zach Simone’s release announcement:

It’s an app for people who record, track, and monitor their blood glucose and use HealthKit to do it. Glucomate is the app that finally does something with all that data. You can analyse recent readings, spot trends, or go back to any date and view its history. It does all this while trying to look as good as possible. A notable feature is the ability to customise each of the tabs by reordering the displayed data. You can even choose to hide the data that isn’t relevant to you.

Today, Nat Friedman announced that npm is joining GitHub:

I’m excited to announce that GitHub has signed an agreement to acquire npm.

npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Together, they’ve helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world. We at GitHub are honored to be part of the next chapter of npm’s story and to help npm continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community.

For the millions of developers who use the public npm registry every day, npm will always be available and always be free. Our focus after the deal closes will be to:

• Invest in the registry infrastructure and platform. The JavaScript ecosystem is massive and growing quickly. It needs a rock-solid registry. We will make the investments necessary to ensure that npm is fast, reliable, and scalable.

• Improve the core experience. We will work to improve the everyday experience of developers and maintainers, and support the great work already started on the npm v7 CLI, which will remain free and open source. Some bigger features that we’re excited about are Workspaces and improvements to the publishing and multi-factor authentication experience. 
• Engage with the community. We will actively engage with the JavaScript community to get your ideas and help us define the future of npm.

Looking further ahead, we’ll integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it. Open source security is an important global issue, and with the recent launch of the GitHub Security Lab and GitHub’s built-in security advisories, we are well-positioned to make a difference. In addition, GitHub Sponsors has already paid out millions of dollars to open source contributors, and we’re excited to explore tasteful ways to extend it to the npm ecosystem.

This is a huge announcement for the JavaScript ecosystem and I’m curious to see where this goes. I think overall it’ll be a good thing for the community.

Chart.xkcd is a chart library plots “sketchy”, “cartoony” or “hand-drawn” styled charts.

Installation is simple via npm:

npm i chart.xkcd

and usage:

import chartXkcd from 'chart.xkcd';
const myChart = new chartXkcd.Line(svg, {...});

Chart.xkcd supports line charts, bar charts, pie charts, and more. If you’d like to find out more about this charting library visit the official documentation.

Now you can review code and merge changes from anywhere with the GitHub Mobile App

GitHub for mobile gives you the flexibility to move work forward and stay in touch with your team, wherever you are. There’s a lot you can do on GitHub that doesn’t require a complex development environment, like sharing feedback on a design discussion and reviewing a few lines of code. Now we are making these tasks easy for you to perform, no matter where you work, with a beautifully native experience.

The iOS version is in beta now and the Android app will be launching soon.

Microsoft announced a new open source font named Cascadia Code…

Cascadia Code was announced this past May at Microsoft’s Build event. It is the latest monospaced font shipped from Microsoft and provides a fresh experience for command line experiences and code editors. Cascadia Code was developed hand-in-hand with the new Windows Terminal application. This font is most recommended to be used with terminal applications and text editors such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

Besides it being a good looking font it always supports ligatures and works great with Visual Studio Code. You can download it on Github and read the full announcement on Microsoft’s site.

Calibre launched a new GitHub Action that allows you to compress raster images with minimal setup and automatically run on every pull request. Here is how it works:

The action uses the most efficient, lossless compression libraries—mozjpeg and libvips that work with PNGs and JPGs. What’s excellent about embedding a compression step directly in the developer platform (or CI) rather than in local development environments (or relying on drag-and-drop tools) is that no image can hit production uncompressed. This empowers any contributors with basic knowledge of GitHub to update images without introducing performance regression and saves everyone time.

You can find this action on Github’s Action marketplace and the source code is available too.

Nord is an arctic, north-bluish color palette that was created for the clean and uncluttered design pattern to achieve an optimal focus and readability for code syntax highlighting and UI components. The palette is subtle and pleasing to the eye as you can see in the following sample from the VS Code port:

Of course, VS Code is not the only editor supported. Nord has been ported to many different IDE’s, code editors, terminals, and more. For more information check out the official Nord site with all the details, the documentation, and for ways to download it for your editor.

Google announced it’s open sourcing their robots.txt parser:

For 25 years, the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) was only a de-facto standard. This had frustrating implications sometimes. On one hand, for webmasters, it meant uncertainty in corner cases, like when their text editor included BOM characters in their robots.txt files. On the other hand, for crawler and tool developers, it also brought uncertainty; for example, how should they deal with robots.txt files that are hundreds of megabytes large?

Today, we announced that we’re spearheading the effort to make the REP an internet standard. While this is an important step, it means extra work for developers who parse robots.txt files.

We’re here to help: we open sourced the C++ library that our production systems use for parsing and matching rules in robots.txt files. This library has been around for 20 years and it contains pieces of code that were written in the 90’s. Since then, the library evolved; we learned a lot about how webmasters write robots.txt files and corner cases that we had to cover for, and added what we learned over the years also to the internet draft when it made sense.

Vignette is an iOS app with a single goal. Add photos to your contacts by searching public social media profiles. It starts with Gravatar, then Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and more importantly it uses public images so you don’t have to log in to those services or even have an account.

Here is an example of the app in action after it searches for and finds images:

If multiple images are found, it’s easy to select the one you wish to use. Outside of the primary goal Vignette has the two core tenants:

• Privacy is paramount
  All the processing is done on your device and your contacts are never uploaded to some server out of your control.
• You are the customer
  Their customer is you, not some business they are selling your contacts to.

Vignette allows you to scan your contacts and see what it can find for free. Then, if you wish to actually save these updates to your contact list, you must pay for a one-time in-app purchase of $4.99.

For more information check out the announcement post or download it from the app store.

Diversity Avatars is an icon project to show people from around the world. Each icon is easily editable, comes with reusable elements, and works in your favorite design apps.

The avatars come in three packages, free for 30, 250 for $49, and 770 for $69. These would be great to add to your toolbox for your next UI design. Find out more and download the 30 free ones at Diversity Avatars.