News: GH Copilot Workspace Review, the Latest in Web UI, and React Suspense Drama

Front-End Fire

Today’s episode covers a slew of hot topics making headlines in the web development and general technology world.

TJ kicks off the show with his firsthand experience of GitHub Copilot Workspace (available to users by invite only). He tested Copilot Workspace with a relatively simple issue in one of his repos, and while the plan Copilot came up with seemed sound, the implementation didn’t end up working. It took Copilot several minutes each time he asked it to try and code a working solution again too, which wasn’t the best experience. While it’s still extremely early days for Copilot Workspace, it still has a ways to go before it will replace developers at this rate.

The next topic is around a talk at Google I/O: the latest in web UI. In the talk, Google DevRel Lead, Una Kravets, highlights some of the best new features out like native scroll driven animations and view transitions, the introduction of the popover API and anchor positioning in CSS, and CSS container queries and nesting and layout, typography, and color improvements. Her talk is accompanied by slick visual demos and is definitely worth a watch.

Next up is some new drama in the React world: the React team is solidly considering fundamentally changing the way Suspense works in React 19, and the general React public is not happy about it. Hopefully their concerns are heard before it gets finalized.

And there’s a bit of bonus news as well: Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) unveiled “Apple Intelligence”, Apple’s answer to AI, which will include Siri interfacing with Chat GPT 4o when it doesn’t know the answer, custom, AI-generated emojis, and the new Safari 18 beta version. Jack also recommends a cool CSS browser extension called Design GUI for managing colors in CSS variables.

News:

• Paige - The latest in Web UI (Google I/O ‘24) talk
• Jack - React Suspense drama in React 19
• TJ - GitHub Copilot Workspace

Bonus news:

• Safari 18 Beta is out
• Apple unveils Apple Intelligence its answer to AI
• Design GUI CSS browser extension

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Substack newsletters
• Jack - Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire movie
• TJ - A Brief History of Intelligence book

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

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