He also serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

Incidents

The Workers Who Keep the Web Safe in an Unsafe World

Animal Crossing Helped Me Get Back to Real Life

New Rules of the Classroom: Remote Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever

Function with Anil Dash

Open World is a fiction anthology podcast about how science and technology serve as a backdrop for imagining a better future, helping us envision the positive influence that science and tech can play in a real future. 

Open World is produced by Keisha "TK" Dutes and hosted by critically-acclaimed podcaster Rose Eveleth, for Glitch. By speaking to the pressing concerns of our times through love, friendship, community, compassion, and sustainability, the host will help listeners imagine new ways forward into a future that is less scary and more positive, and something we can start working on constructively.  

Open World launches weekly episodes in Spring 2020. Want to contact the show? Email youropenworld@glitch.com.

Open World

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. We’ll talk to some of our top creators, explore cool apps, and even hear from the people who work at Glitch!

Shift Shift Forward

From idea to code in seconds, build and learn alongside the most creative coders on the Web

Welcome to the Glitch Blog ✨

— Glitch Blog

Sometimes it feels like time is going by so fast, but as 2022 hops on from month to month we find that taking time out to reflect on the things that happen each month helps to demonstrate just how much is accomplished by the Glitch community each and every day. Recognizing your hard work, the kindness that you put out into the world, and the sense of wonder created by your imaginative projects is a constant reminder of how much curiosity and joy exists and the potential to discover even more. 

To complement that work, we recently gave the glitch.com homepage a long look and decided to jazz things up a little. We hope you enjoy the recent update. And, in case you missed it, our director of community, Jenn Schiffer recently appeared in a webinar with friends from Fastly and EdgeMesh to discuss Democratizing the Edge where many Glitch community shoutouts happened. Let’s continue the celebration of your efforts with April’s roundup of awesome projects, playlists, and more!

True,~park by@oa495 is an oldie but came up in a discussion about accessibility and drag-and-drop implementations. It’s such a neat example, we had to share!

~speakgame by @r0 is a game where you guess which language has the most native speakers

~emojia by @LingDong- is an online multiplayer world made ~~entirely~~ of emojis.

~whack-a-paw by @NatoshiBanamoto is a cute lil whack-a-mole game

To celebrate 9000 followers on Twitter, @adarosecannon made ~scouter!

~needle-bike is a WebXR bike configuration app that @marwie built and shared in our forum

~market-forces by @OkayHughes is a very visually satisfying art project, just watch.

~digitiser-cartoon-strip-generator is an old cartoon strip generator that @doug brought back from the Wayback Machine and put onto Glitch so it can live again!

~nails by @CharStiles allows you to click and drag in the embed for an odd surprise

~a-small-memorial by @toddwords is a beautiful, interactive memorial, part of this new online journal, The HTML Review

~dapper-lofty-elk by @ladylarisa123 is an awesome looking coded poem from an SFPC student

~aromatic-paint-tire by @ariaandsam excuse generator, anyway I would’ve loved to have gone out tonight but I’m currently looking for my wallet.

~bill-split-app is a sweet bill-splitting utility by @cool-peaches, who replied to the latest Glitch newsletter to share it!

YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A CAR (by @OverlappingElvis lol)

~phone-from-dilemma by@aTylerRobertson is a fully-featured replica of Kelly Rowland's spreadsheet phone in the music video for Dilemma.

~lassoism is a Ted Lasso-ism generator by @danfishgold and @lexipedia.shir. That’s right, Betty White.

~dot-cats is like Dwarf Fortress but with cats by @bengarvey and @sashatgarvey

Check out these cool cats dropping in ~overly-particular by @rowan-m

~kyloscosplaycarousel by arianna1098765 is the greatest Star Wars fansite created.

Even though we love cats, ~knockitoverfinal by@haue807 is an annoying-cat simulator

~glib-shorthaired-foxglove by @Reddlake is a simple keyboard drum kit

~bluez by @RonakChovatiya is a cool audio visualizer

~build-excellent-websites by@hankchizljaw is a guide to help you...build excellent websites!

@giulia.laco's CSS playlist includes a few apps to aid in teaching CSS concepts

…and for the JS crowd...@dublinacademy's JavaScript Help playlist shows some simple JavaScript concepts

@robloxrules has a playlist with a couple of instrument apps!

We love hearing what you love about Glitch, and all of the unique ways the community experiences Glitch, or how it empowers them to create. Here is a recent shout-out. 

The app being discussed here is ~only-the-questions created by Clive Thompson and we couldn’t agree more! Read Clive’s post on the motivation behind building this project.

The biggest thanks, of course, goes out to you—the Glitch community for continuing to make the web and the world, a fun and special and interesting place to be. As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~double-pendulum-grid by @d.carverwilliams and was posted in the oddlysatisfying subreddit. It definitely earns that placement.

Sometimes it feels like time is going by so fast, but as 2022 hops on from month to month we find that taking time out to reflect on the things that happen each month helps to demonstrate just how much is accomplished by the Glitch community each and every day.

Last month on Glitch, the April 2022 edition

The Glitch community will no longer be able to use a Facebook account to log in to Glitch. If you created your Glitch account with Facebook, don’t fret, you will still be able to log in with the email address associated with your Facebook account. And if you don’t use Facebook, you don’t have to do anything!

Even better, you can use the handy Magic Link feature to update your Account Settings and change your password. 

The Glitch community has shown an overwhelming preference for other login services. This change helps us simplify the Glitch experience and more importantly, matches what our community has shared about their expectations for the platforms they trust. Creating and maintaining an inclusive environment where creators feel empowered to experiment and share is a responsibility we take seriously. 

Your trust is essential to us so we wanted to be clear about this change, and make sure you know you’ll always have access to your projects no matter how you log in.

Have features you’d like to see in Glitch? Let us know by sharing on the community forum.

The Glitch community will no longer be able to use a Facebook account to log in to Glitch.

A little poke: Still using Facebook login?

All of our Glitch Node.js starter projects use the efficient and flexible server framework Fastify. The Fastify team recently released a major update–version 4 includes a number of improvements, but you will need to make a few changes to any existing remixes you created on Glitch before we updated the starters to use it. Read on to learn more!

You can read all about the changes in Fastify 4 in the announcement blog post–here are a few highlights:

Callback and promise confusion has been reduced by requiring calls to reply to be part of a return statement.

Error handling is now encapsulated to improve consistency.

Type providers are now included, allowing your apps to infer types from JSON Schema.

The listen signature has been simplified, with a view to improved contributor maintenance experience.

The minimum Node version now supported is 14.

Kudos to the Fastify maintainers and community for consistently developing a framework that affords Glitch Node.js apps such great performance!

When you edit a Node.js app in Glitch, you can manage your npm dependencies in the package.json file using the dropdown list that shows you any packages that have updates available. If you have a remix of Hello Node, Hello SQLite, or the blank / minimal versions of either of these starter projects, you’ll see the Fastify 4 update in the dropdown list–but you’ll need to make a few additional changes to get your app working with the new version.

Fastify 4 requires at least Node version 14, and there are some packages the starters use that have been deprecated and replaced–there are also a couple of minor server syntax changes.

In your project, open the Logs so that you see the progress unfold. Don’t worry when you see the little sweary face in your app Status at the bottom of the Glitch editor as you carry out the updates–it’s all part of the fun and they’ll turn happy again by the time you’re done!

Check out the help doc for detailed steps, here’s the TLDR; on what you’ll need to change:

Update the node version in your package JSON to 14

Remove any of the deprecated packages: fastify-static, fastify-formbody, point-of-view

Add any of these that you still plan on using with their replacements: @fastify/static, @fastify/view, @fastify/formbody

Update references to these in your server JS code

Update your server JS code listen function to pass the host and port values inside an object, like this: fastify.listen({port:process.env.PORT, host:'0.0.0.0'}...

Include calls to reply in a return statement

Give Glitch a little time to update and rebuild your project between steps and hopefully it’ll work the way you expect! If you have any issues take a look in the Logs, and turn on detailed logging in your server JS file if necessary. 

Check out the updated starters to see the new syntax in action:

Are you building anything new with the updated Fastify capabilities? Share it on the community forum!

Those two beautiful cheetah photographs at the top of the post were taken and shared with the commons by William Warby and James Temple 🐆

Smarter starters and better error handling, thanks to Fastify 4!

What gives something the quality of being dreamy? Maybe you picture being in a through the looking glass type of pastel and foggy environment similar to somewhere real, but not quite right. Maybe you’re flying through space and time with superhuman abilities. Or maybe, you’re somewhere relaxing, with no one calling, texting, or asking you to be anything to anyone at all. That’s the thing about dreams — they’re different for everyone. Yet, somehow the Glitch community managed to make May a very dreamy month with both new and existing projects that made us stop to take some much needed time away from our collective realities. 

While you were dreaming, here are some very real and cool things that happened with Glitch. First, we joined Fastly! It’s a very exciting opportunity for both the product and the Glitch community and we can’t wait to tell you more about the road ahead. We also changed up the login process for those of you who joined Glitch with a Facebook account. No worries! Your account won’t change, you just have to update it. Read the full announcement, after you’ve seen all the very rad things created in May. 😏 

~draw-your-world by @enauman is a really inspiring project where p5.js is used to draw different elements from photos of the real world!

~strangely comes across the feed occasionally as @rowan-m updates it. Very satisfying :)

~lilcode-3dspace by @cafeinternet is a cool, chaotic 3D environment

~windowpane by @leannefthuang is an “examination of the self through art historical cultural ties, to better understand myself and myself as part of the Asian American diaspora.”

~conwaygameoflife-twitter-embed by @johuber is the iconic zero-player game, made to be embedded in a tweet!

~dream-geography by @niall84571 is a dreamy record of the places they’ve visited in their dreams.

thatkatharine.glitch.me - They learned how to do rounded corners in CSS for this, so that’s pretty awesome. 

m4g3.glitch.me is a Glitch in Bio with a cool, spacey goth theme.

~betterbandpod by @brandenpalomo is a Glitch in Bio for a Pearl Jam podcast!

~ridiculous-silly-header is @jessevondoom’s step-by-step process demo of the rainbow text on the Glitch homepage!

~heropetz by @jojo080889 is a 90s style Petz fan site. It looks so good!

~a11y-bingo by @ollicle and @alex.day is an accessibility (a11y) bingo card

We’ve shared this before, but it’s making the rounds again: ~phd-template by @aandreev0 is a really great template for generating welcome letters to (PhD) students and setting lab expectations.

~birds-eye-cards is another great project from the folks at @bplmaps that presents a visual pattern system of aerial images.

We love this lil character, ~invisibleq by @luarnmama

~carfig by @JacobWaites is an adorable, vibrant scene for a car color chooser made in Spline! Spline even gave it some praise!

And for the bike riders, the folks at Needle created ~needle-bike to demonstrate realtime exploration of 3D models and mock-ups – built in Unity and published on Glitch!

~like-like by @elankiderman is a really amazing tool for wandering through Twitter. Our friend Tom calls it “a beautiful meditation.”

~citibikes by @LouisMinsky helps you find Citibike locations with ebikes. Follow @citibikestats on Twitter if you’re an NYC local and want to know the latest.

~scoreboard-ultimate by @philiprenich is a minimal, sweet scoreboard tracker

~yellow-somber-bobolink by @catherineomega was built to help someone who has lost their voice save themselves some words.

~yunai-movenet by @NadiaPiet is a Master thesis project using machine learning to detect yoga poses!

~riverriverriver by @mipmckeever is a no-code version of their tool for storing, searching and displaying news wires.

~pathway-generator by @carolynlimadeo is a very sweet learning pathway generator, and you can remix it to add your own tools for more personal speculative futures!

Looks like ~spicy-snowy-starfish was the winner of the #100devs coding competition! (Credits are in app) 🍕

~goodbye-monster by @beckett is a browser-based pet sim made as a class project so it may not be openly accessible but you can see screenshots in this tweet.

~your-first-tech-job by @aTylerRobertson is a “persistently online multiplayer game of Espionage.”

We love this: ~choose-budget-dinner by @snotskie is an app that helps you and others you meal plan with decide on dinners together.

From soothing stories about dreams, to seeing big cities from a bird's eye view, or dreaming about not having to decide what’s for dinner, we’re a big fan of what you all imagine and create with Glitch!  As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~of-touch by @melaniehoff and @amyfang123 and we highly recommend you click and drag around this beautiful interactive poem!

What gives something the quality of being dreamy? Maybe you picture being in a through the looking glass type of pastel and foggy environment similar to somewhere real, but not quite right.

Last month on Glitch, the May 2022 edition

For our latest newsletter, I interviewed head of product, Jesse von Doom, who not only made this beautiful collection of colors in text happen, but he also created this well-commented demo on Glitch that walks you step by step through making a gradient header with different colored links. 

I asked him a few questions about the process, but we couldn’t fit it all into the newsletter, so please enjoy our newest series on the blog: This Was Too Big to Fit in Our Newsletter.

Color is a great tool for communicating a lot of nuance in any design. If pictures are worth a thousand words color has to be worth a few hundred at least. At Glitch we work with a wide, bright palette. We’re really intentional about the meaning behind it. We want the first impression of Glitch to be welcoming, optimistic, and lightweight. 

If you look at the Glitch homepage you’ll notice colors chosen for the header are the two main colors in the Glitch logo. On the page the logo itself is tiny, so the header is a call-back while the colors chosen for the links themselves are some of the brightest in our palette. So the idea was to be big and bold in how we invite people to build with Glitch, but to use color to reinforce that our community is inclusive, friendly, playful, and helpful.

(All of this is really valid, but also I just really love rainbows.)

How did you make having two headers shown as one accessible?

This part was super important — we’re technically using two headers to make the effect work. One with the main gradient text, and another mostly-invisible header for the links. It’d be a really bad experience for people using screen readers if the header were read twice, so we hide the header without links from screen readers using the `aria-hidden` attribute. 

What was the most challenging part of making it all work?

Getting two slightly different bits of text to wrap identically at all responsive screen sizes is a lot of attention to detail. So it meant explicitly setting a lot more CSS properties than usual, and adding a few extra spans to make sure each header matches the other’s footprint exactly. And with a header it’s also worth paying attention to a few other typographic bits like wrapping commas with links, etc. 

Shouts out to Jesse for making that magic happen. And because his demo is on Glitch, you can poke around the code and remix it for yourself! If you make a project with rainbows, text or otherwise, let us know by tweeting @glitch or send us an email at community@glitch.com. 🌈

This Was Too Big to Fit in Our Newsletter: How We Got Rainbows on the Homepage

We have some huge, exciting news for Glitch and the entire Glitch community: Today, Glitch is becoming part of Fastly! We’re joining forces with the Fastly team to bring the creative power of Glitch to even more people, and to help make the internet better by making it easier for everyone to create.

First, for our loyal community of Glitch users who’ve been with us for years: you’re good, we got you. Nothing changes about your apps or your Glitch account with this news, and the changes you’ll see in the future will be about making Glitch better and even more fun and rewarding to use going forward.

If you’re new to Glitch, you should know what we’re about — Glitch is a friendly community where millions of people come together to create, share and remix web apps for work, play and everything in between. 

So, why are we joining forces with Fastly? There are a couple of great reasons. It starts with having more support and resources to keep improving Glitch. We’re hiring for incredible people to come help with this work, starting today with engineering roles on the Developer Relations team, and watch for Glitch-focused support, community and engineering roles coming soon, too. And they’ll be in good company — every single member of the Glitch team is coming along to our new home at Fastly, to continue making the site and the community with the same spirit and care that they’ve shown over the last 5+ years.

Over time, we’ll be tapping into Fastly’s incredible technologies to make it easier than ever to make fast, secure, expressive apps. Today, Fastly is best known for delivering content on the web incredibly quickly (thus the name!) and securely. But we’re also super excited about their edge platform, which will let people build new kinds of apps. We’ll talk more about that once we’ve got some specific stuff to show you, but if you can imagine the cool stuff you’d build with that power, then you’ve probably got a good sense of where we’re headed.

Most fundamentally, we know that Fastly’s whole team really understands what makes Glitch special, and has believed from day one in empowering more people to make a better internet. Glitch will be one of the most prominent parts of a broader effort to give all developers, regardless of their background or level of experience, the power to build sites and apps that are second to none. A lot of the time, when a little company becomes part of a big company, we worry about losing the things that made the little company (and its not-so-little community) really work. In this case, we’re enthusiastic and optimistic about being able to tap into the resources of a much larger and more global company to help Glitch reach the full potential that we’ve always hoped it would. After teaming up with the Fastly team last year on a partnership to give Glitch users access to Fastly’s new edge platform, we realized that we were thinking in very similar ways about how to help the most people create the most cool things possible, and that set the course for the announcement that we’re excited to make today!

We’ll share more details and updates as we go along, but for now, a great way to get a taste of what’s to come is to try out this starter app and make your own.

An Exciting Leap Forward for Glitch

Right at the beginning of 2022, we launched an all-new editor for Glitch, with the promise of lots of improvements to come. So we’re excited to talk about how Fastly is powering some of the coolest new features.

If you don’t know Fastly, they’re a super popular, super powerful platform for delivering sites and apps more quickly, reliably and securely. So we started with what Fastly is best known for — their content delivery network, or CDN. Now, when you upload assets in the all-new Glitch editor, they’re automatically delivered by Fastly’s super-fast CDN, and you don’t have to do any configuration or additional deploy process. (It even works great with assets like 3D objects, which are newly supported in the Glitch editor!)

But what’s even more exciting is the possibilities this opens up for the future. Fastly has a really clever new edge platform called Compute@Edge that is lightning fast and will let you build smarter, more dynamic sites more easily than ever. We’re gearing up for being able to publish your Glitch projects to Fastly — including the long-awaited desire to have separate dev and production versions of your app, with deploy as simple as a click. When it all comes together you'll be able to publish lightning-fast static sites and Compute@Edge will let you build more sophisticated Glitch apps that scale infinitely — with 100x faster code execution startup times than other serverless solutions!

You can try out the fast new assets in the Glitch editor today, and then sign up to join the waiting list for the exciting beta preview to come!

We’re building an all new integration with Fastly's Compute@Edge that lets you build dynamic sites without the overhead of managing a server and lets you build more sophisticated Glitch sites that scale infinitely – we're talking 100x faster code execution startup times than other serverless solutions!

Taking your apps to the Edge: Fastly x Glitch

New for 2022, it's the biggest update ever to Glitch's editor. It's faster, it's easier to use, and it will take you to all new dimensions with 3D asset handling. Our editor is the heart of the Glitch experience: it’s where coders spend the most time, and it’s essential to your creative success. We’ve been working hard to make your everyday experience of creating on Glitch more fun and expressive. The creation experience on Glitch is smarter and swifter than ever, in large part thanks to your suggestions. Check out what we’ve got for you:

The first thing you’ll notice: Everything is just faster. A lot faster. Editing files, navigating through your project, changing your settings, and accessing advanced features are all lightning-quick.

The new editor sports a complete visual overhaul. You spend so much time looking at it, we wanted it to shine for you. Typography is clearer, iconography is cleaner, and a new footer bar gives you instant access to your favorite features, while giving you instant access to your project status.  It’ll turn your 🤔 into a 😃 in no time!

And Glitch is for sharing, so things are getting faster for your project’s visitors, too. All your assets are now cached by Fastly — automatically. It’s a huge FREE upgrade for every app you make on Glitch. Fastly’s got a massively powerful content delivery network, which means all of your assets and images will  load faster than ever for your users thanks to automatic optimization and smart delivery. 

Our number one job at Glitch is to keep you in your creative flow, so we simplify the maintenance of the key files that keep your project’s working happily. (You’ve seen the first version of this before if you’ve ever tweaked your package.json or .env files.) Now we’re extending this capability further with what we’re calling “magic files”, a task-specific UI to help speed you through your edits. Of course, you’re still in control: the files themselves are just standard plain text under the hood, ready for you to edit the old-fashioned way if you want.

There are lots of small conveniences in the new editor that add up to a more pleasant experience overall. Here are some highlights:

✅ Inline error reporting: Glitch has your back when things go awry—we’ll show you errors right on the line that causes them, so you can get things back on track without bouncing between your code and the console.

🥽 3D Asset support: Working with 3D assets? We’ve got you covered there, too, with full 3D previews right in our asset manager. We’re thrilled that Glitch is one of the most popular ways for creating the metaverse, and we want to make that easier than ever.

✨ Improved Prettier formatting: We’ve made our support for Prettier cleaner and more automatic than ever. And as always, you can fully customize your Prettier config to match your particular preferences.

↔️ Easier import, export and domains: We’ve made it simpler to import and export your code to GitHub (there’s never any code lock-in on Glitch!) and made it so adding a domain to your project is just a click away.

Sharing code is foundational to the last two decades of the web. But it’s often a clunky and cumbersome process, involving arcane invocations of command line utilities and version control tools. Glitch makes sharing easy: just type in the email address or Glitch username of your collaborator and we’ll get them into the mix. Riffing together on Glitch is special: it’s fast and easy for your counterpart to dive in, make a tweak, see immediate changes, and get your feedback.

We’ve been amazed over the years by the scale of your creative ambition, and we’re working behind the scenes with third party services to ensure Glitch can continue to serve your project even as it grows. This new editor lays the foundation for future integrations with some exciting new partners.

Better for everyone, and terrific for the Metaverse

So many exciting creations are happening on Glitch around the Metaverse and WebXR. We hope these improvements, like interactive 3D object previews, make it even more fun to build these experiences on Glitch. We can't wait to see what you build.

We built these changes for you. If something is missing, broken, or just makes one of your regular workflows more difficult, we want to know! Hit us up @glitch on Twitter or reach out via email: support@glitch.com.

UI Refinements

	Overall rework of pixel-level detail
	New bottom menu bar:
		Status
		Logs
		Terminal
	Tools menu
	Settings now accessible via explicit Settings button
	More obvious help menu in right corner
	Piano menu to access keyboard shortcuts listing

Asset manager

	Support for 3D assets, including 3D preview
	Automatic Fastly CDN support for all new projects

Code Editor

	Inline error reporting
	Improved code formatting, with Prettier handling more kinds of files

Enhanced magic files

	New state-aware buttons and UI interactions

More help taking first steps

	Remixing a starter gets you a header with extra instructions

Under the hood

	Completely rewritten using Vite for speed of delivery


Behold: An all new Glitch editor!

Welcome to September! Which means almost fall, which means almost Halloween and then the holidays and now it’s basically 2022. Welcome to the last few days of 2021, basically. If you too feel like time is flying, take comfort (or a breather!) by checking out all of the cool things that the Glitch community put together during the month of August while some of us just completely lost track of time. 

Wait, before we get started, one important thing worth mentioning is glitch.new just in case you missed it. Enjoy this shortcut to many of our starter apps, including Eleventy, React, and SQLite, or get down to business building your app, so we can feature it in next month’s community roundup. 

~imagining-progress by @louis-yes is a paper doll app made for a rock-climbing friend.

Try coloring in this fun plan of Boston, or make your own at coloring-book-generator.glitch.me, created by @bplmaps.

~joline-spirograph by @meklarian is a spirograph app and in this house we love spirographs!

~hex-triplet-words by @annoyedhumanoid is a beautiful display of hex colors that also are words, as shown off on the Glitch forum’s Gallery.

~solid-spangled-ranunculus by @habbekak is a soundboard for saying “Michael” several different ways.

~endless-nothing by @ghostglyph is a really simple poetry generator.

Check out ~todays-album, created by @tec27, after he saw some people tweeting that it was the anniversary of an album he liked.

We loved this experimentation with reflections in A-Frame, created by @cwervo.

~bikelanes by @hootalex visualizes the distance of bike lanes laid throughout the country!

~mostcommonjsprojects by @christinavoudouris lets you search the top JavaScript projects on GitHub.

~htmlview by @fonsp lets you view a rendered html doc of an html file from GitHub.

~every-different-district by @bplmaps shows US congressional districts according to various demographic variables, like median income.

@josepharhar built ~accent-color to demo some actually cool and exciting CSS changes coming for form elements.

~p5 is a clever use for the glitch.me domain for this p5.glitch package, built by @ffd8.

@Potch made a dashboard-friendly view of @NOAA’s smoke forecasts: ~us-smoke-forecast.

Miscellaneous and necessary! 👽 🦖 🤠

~ringlight is a digital, adjustable ringlight by@jlozovei. Remix and change its colors to suit your lighting needs!

~theuseless-web by @Zrafei will drop you into one of many “useless web” apps.

~create-a-jazzword by @holgerkurtz is a password generator where you can play the password.

~memepool by @everyplace is a resource for their Cooper Union Interactive Design course which displays resources stored in a Google Sheet.

~roadtrip is for road trips without birds, ~birdtrip is for road trips with birds.

not only are ~favicon-snake and ~favicon-pong by @aTylerRobertson really cool, but we also came across his ~pin-tab-pomo. It’s really cool to see the use of the favicon in tabs here!

~threejs-gltf-mosquito by @mrdoob has us really excited for a Jurassic Park event in the metaverse one day.

~thisolesyadoesnotexist is another great app from @monolesan, generating fake photos of her using a generative adversarial network (GAN).

Did you know that many New England town names are duplicated across the six states? This new tool from @bplmaps shows you which ones are the most common: ~town-after-town. 

Which of these apps will you be remixing to put your own spin on things? For the uninitiated, remixing is creating your own copy of an existing project. From there, you can customize the project and make other changes. Already an existing project owner, but want to add the nifty Remix button to your project? Use this link!

As always, if you have Glitch projects you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your project in our next roundup! ✨

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~fishdraw built by Lingdong Huang, which has been shared widely via Hacker News and Twitter. 

Welcome to almost September! Which means almost fall, which means almost Halloween and then the holidays and now it’s basically 2022.

Last month on Glitch, the August 2021 edition

Today, we’re introducing Playlists to Glitch — bringing all the power of organizing, sharing and discovering new apps, in a way that’s as familiar and fun as the playlists you use to manage music, videos, or anything else. (And good news: we’ve migrated all existing Collections on Glitch to be playlists, so there are already over 100,000 to explore!) 

Remember making a mixed tape? Or burning a CD with your favorite songs on them? Or—what’s the modern-day equivalent—creating a playlist on your favorite streaming app? Playlists are as fun to make as they are to receive. Both activities are labors of love and creativity. Most importantly, playlists are an instrument to help our community’s projects reach the people who would most find joy in using them.

Glitch is built around an important idea, that creating and sharing apps is as important as creating and sharing photos, documents, videos or anything else. So of course it should be just as fun and easy! So that’s why we’ve created playlists. Borrowing from the familiar metaphor we’ve all come to know, playlists of apps make it easy to share a collection of apps or projects while adding useful context, for yourself or for others.

The first thing you need to know about playlists is you don’t need to know how to code to create and curate playlists. In fact, being a playlist curator is a great way to be a creator on Glitch, just like making apps is. You get all the same joys of sharing creativity with the world and doing something helpful for the community, and the opportunity for others to thank you for sharing.

Each playlist features newly styled project cards stacked vertically in the order of your choosing. To the right of the cards, curators can add notes on any app in a playlist, to explain why the app is useful, or just to help you remember what you liked about a project you saved. 

Don’t forget to give your playlist a title. You can also add a description at the top, to help describe what colleagues and community members can expect from your playlist. Maybe it’s a themed playlist, or a series of tutorials, or just a collection of your greatest hits!

Play mode: To make it even easier to discover apps in playlists, we’ve made a playback mode where you can walk through all the apps in a playlist. It’s perfect for learners who want to step through a list of related apps, or just to check out a series of projects for inspiration.

Playlist curation is a great way to organize your profile, collect apps from the rest of the community, and share Glitch apps with others. That’s why we wanted to make it even easier to highlight creators. At the bottom of each playlist you curate, people will be able to see other apps and projects you’ve built. And it’s easier than ever to show the love! You can thank playlist creators right from the playlist, just like you can thank app creators everywhere on Glitch. It’s a nice way to make their day brighter, and yours too!

If you poke around Glitch.com, you’ll see some other updates.

Creating playlists is one way to update your Glitch profile, but we wanted to make it all look snazzy. Each individual project page has been updated to reflect the new card styles presented in playlists, as well as highlights the additional apps or projects a project creator has built, making it even easier to surface great apps from the Glitch community. The new cards style for projects also now show up in search results.  Lastly, on keeping things cool: As always, we care about keeping Glitch a friendly and welcoming place for everyone, so we’ve made it simpler than ever to flag things on Glitch that might be potentially troublesome. Click the report abuse button to flag anything that’s not up to our community standards.

In order to spark creativity or maybe just pique your curiosity, we’re sharing some playlists the Glitch team put together to help get you started.

Today, we’re introducing Playlists to Glitch — bringing all the power of organizing, sharing and discovering new apps, in a way that’s as familiar and fun as the playlists you use to manage music, videos, or anything else.