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news Episode 73

OpenAI Goes Pro, React 19 is Stable, and Figma's New Competitor Onlook

🎉 React 19 is finally stable and packed with features! 💰 OpenAI drops a $200/month ChatGPT Pro with coding superpowers. 🎨 Onlook makes designing in your own React apps as easy as Figma. It’s the news roundup you didn’t know you needed!

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In our last news episode of the year, we share that React 19 is declared stable, just in time for the holidays. It’s been a long road from release candidate in April to stability now, but it was well worth the wait. React 19 is packing a lot of features, including: Actions, hooks, form actions, the new use API, and of course, React Server Components and Server Actions. OpenAI’s been busy as well, introducing ChatGPT Pro, its $200 a month subscription for unlimited access to OpenAI o1 (the “reasoning" model), GPT-4o, and Advanced Voice mode. Additionally, the startup announced the ChatGPT desktop app for macOS can now read code in a handful of developer-focused coding apps, like VS Code, XCode, Terminal, and iTerm2. There’s a new challenger to Figma for styling React-based code bases called Onlook. Onlook is a browser-based product studio that lets you design React code with Tailwind CSS using an easy-to-use interface just like you would in Figma. Swap text, change fonts, increase padding, adjust typography, colors, opacity, etc. - even design new React apps from scratch in Onlook, and write your changes back to the code in real-time. Apple finally releases iOS 18.2 and more Apple Intelligence features like AI image generation and Siri querying OpenAI for questions, but the initial offerings are a little underwhelming after all the hype. And today’s Fire Starter is all about customizable selects coming to browsers in the next year or two. A pain point for basically the entirety of the Internet, <select> elements will finally be able to be custom-styled with the help of pseudo-elements, but also fallback to traditional styling if the new styling’s not yet supported by the browser.

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