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Yesterday, Webflow launched a new tool called 'Webflow Ecommerce' — an entirely visual platform for building and launching online stores. The tool is a direct competitor with Shopify, the current leader in an easy-to-use solutions for digital stores.

But here's Webflow's edge: It's code-free.

Y Combinator graduate, Webflow, has been around since 2013 — it's a an all-in-one web design/CMS/hosting platform. And users love it.

“This is an *amazing* tool. I've done front-end web dev for a decade and I would rather build sites using this tool.” - Sameer, 2013

“Webflow is such a powerful tool for Makers.” - Julie, yesterday

And here's why Webflow Ecommerce could take market share away from Shopify: Makers want flexible, customizable, powerful, code-free tools. It's another example of the rise of rise of “no code.”

This month alone, we've seen these code-free products launch:

🚀 Actiondesk is a Google Sheets/Zapier hybrid
🚀 Glide lets you create mobile apps from Google Sheets
🚀 Tinybot helps you create powerful Twitter bots without code
🚀 Sheety turns Google Sheets into an API
🚀 Look Mom No Code gives you no-code templates for your next startup

In fact, three of the top five products on Product Hunt yesterday use Webflow to power their websites. 😳

Note: Shopify’s not doing so bad themselves:



So we're eager to watch how no-code unfolds in the land of ecommerce. 👀

There are a lottt of reasons to love Dark Mode. Things like:

✅ It's good for your eyes
✅ It's good for your device's battery
✅ It's good for your sanity
✅ It is elegant

Dark Mode is oft-requested and the tech giants take heed. Popular apps like Twitter, Medium, Reddit, YouTube, Kindle and Wikipedia all support darker themes. Last week, Google released a set of 14 alternate Chrome color palettes, including “Just Black” aka Dark Mode. It's also rumored that the upcoming Android OS will have system-wide Dark Mode. And Apple is reportedly adding a new Dark Mode to your iPhone later this year.

If you need more Dark Mode and you need it *now* — there's Dark Reader, a browser extension that turns every website into Night Mode.

As of this week, Dark Mode's reach extended to IRL products, such as a black dot grid notebook made for designers.

Need more?

Here are 91 apps that support dark browsing bliss.

Pro Tip: You can now skip non-skippable YouTube ads with the MacBook Pro Touch Bar.

Which is really great news because...we're giving away a 128GB Macbook Pro! Courtesy of our friends at Finimize, Triphop, Bloom and Hunted.

In addition to the Touch Bar, that Macbook has:

🚀Super high‑performance processors and memory
👀 Advanced graphics
📦 Blazing-fast storage

Enter to win here.

That is all.

We're going to warn you right now — this is creeeepy.

Yesterday, This Person Does Not Exist surfaced on Product Hunt and presented the internet with random, computer generated people. You have to try it for yourself to see why we have the heebie-jeebies.

If you're too scared, here's how it works: When you click on the website, you conjure an image of a person's face on to your browser. Refresh the page, and you'll get another face. The creepy part: these people never existed in real-life, even though they look so real. It's an AI magic trick.

“How am I so scared and so impressed all at once?” - R. Colin

“This is stomach-turningly good. Yikes.” - Elizabeth

“This kind of stuff is going to be huge in a near future in opinion. Not only in stock photos/videos but also in film making / Broadcast. Imagine having fake but 100% real-looking actors/anchors?” - Sabastien

How it actually works: The technology behind This Person Does Not Exist is a type of algorithm called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). It basically splits AI into separate, competing sets of algorithms — one set tries to create something while the other set judges if it's a real or fake. In this case, the GAN is used on photos of people’s faces, but it can work on anime, artwork, etc., etc.

The technology has the potential to revolutionize a lot, such as video games, 3D-modeling or tools used for mockups and prototypes.

In the meantime, some other fun tools for your face:

😀 Reflect Face Swap

😱 Face Swap Live

😛 FaceApp

😊 Facehub

🙃 Flesh Mesh

What's next for email? Keeping you calm, apparently. 😌

Consider, an email client designed to keep you calm, launched on Product Hunt yesterday to a warm welcome. A little on the app's backstory:

“We started Consider because we're fans of email. We like that email doesn’t interrupt you. And that subject lines keep threads focused. And we love that anyone can email anyone else. But email has its problems, problems that we are all too familiar with.” - Consider Maker, Ben McRedmond

The problems he's referencing are checking your email a hundred times a day and never getting to (0) in your inbox. 😬

So how does Consider *actually* make things calmer?

Consider uses “Digests,” which means you'll receive email in three batches each day (at times you choose). However, your most important email contacts skip digests so you won't miss the really important stuff. Consider also uses “Precise Notifications” for things that absolutely can't wait. And it lets you block or mute automated senders. 🙏

Some initial thoughts from the PH community:

“The digests feature has saved me from myself - got into a really bad habit of checking email every few minutes with other clients “ - Simon

“I pretty much love anything that validates how long email has been around, and how long it's gonna stay around. Thanks for building a good thing for email, y'all!” - Josh

“It keeps different kinds of work inside the inbox, so I'm more organized with more peace of mind to a space that is historically hectic.” - Megan

Important to note: This blissful email experience will cost you $14/month. 🤑

More ways you can get to inbox zero *bliss*:

💌 Polymail

💌 Leave Me Alone

💌 Newton Mail

💌 Superhuman

💌 TL;DR for Apple Watch

💌 Boxy Suite

Instagram is reportedly testing a web version of DMs. This means you can get the thrill of a notification in your Insta inbox even when you're not on your phone.

*gasps*

Could Instagram turn into full-blown SMS? Maybe. But this possible new feature is really part of a larger shift we're seeing away from mindless scrolling and towards private, group-oriented messaging.

We already know Facebook is leanin' into private messaging. Last week the company announced that it plans to unify the backend infrastructure for its messaging suite — WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger — and allow cross-app chat. Facebook also added new management tools and features for groups last week, which includes things like a mentorship feature, formatting for posts and bulleted lists.

And it makes sense. More people reportedly use messaging platforms (4.1B in 2018 across the top 4 messaging apps) than social networks (roughly 3.4B social media MAUs worldwide). Marketers are also taking notice — Giphy CEO Alex Chung has publicly said he thinks brands should advertise in private messages.

So as people shift away from broadcast (RIP The Feed) — where will online communities gather?

We have some ideas (besides Instagram, Facebook, What'sApp, Snap and Twitter):

Telegram is secure, simple instant messaging 💬

Signal is a mobile app for highly secure end-to-end messaging 🔒

Discord is a voice and text chat app designed specifically for gamers 🎮

October is a visual and pseudonymous social network 🙈

Duoshan (created by ByteDance) is an ephemeral video chat app 📹

Squad lets you screen share with friends from a group video chat 👥

Mighty Networks is a platform for people to gather around niche interests 🙌

Islands is Slack for college 🌴

NextDoor is a social app that lets you connect with your neighbors 🏠

Peach lets you share what you feel, think, see and hear with friends. Yes, it's still alive! 🍑

Some biiiig money is going behind getting robots to deliver stuff to your doorstep. Yesterday, autonomous delivery startup Nuro got a huge influx of cash ($940M) from Softbank. 💸

Ultimately, Nuro wants to bring driverless delivery vehicles to the masses. How it works: Nuro's current “R1” vehicle looks like a mini compact car, and customers can request and track a delivery through the company's smartphone app. After the vehicle arrives, users verify the order with a password or biometric authentication. Nuro is currently operating these fully driverless vehicles on public roads in Scottsdale, Arizona, and charging $5.95 per delivery.

Nuro is part of the growing last mile delivery space, where startups are rushing to own the category. 📦

About a month ago, Postmates debuted Serve, a cute last-mile delivery rover that looks like a mix of WALL-E and a Minion. There's also Starship, a robotics firm founded in 2014 by the co-founders of Skype. Marble, another autonomous delivery firm, debuted its self-driving robots in 2017 and already partnered with DoorDash and Yelp. Robomart describes itself as a “self-driving store” — it's sort of like a self-driving vending machine. BoxBot was founded in 2016 by engineers from Tesla and Uber with a focus on last-mile logistics. And Amazon quietly acquired robotics company Dispatch to build Scout, its own on-demand delivery robot that debuted last month.

How Nuro is different: The company has been largely focused on developing a self-driving “stack,” which it's now licensing to others. For example, Ike, an autonomous trucking startup, is now using Nuro's technology — and Nuro is getting a stake in Ike. Ike was founded by ex-Apple, Google and Uber employees and announced a new $52M round last week. In June, Nuro also partnered with Kroger Co. — the largest supermarket chain in the U.S. — to test driverless grocery deliveries. 🛒

Nuro has built just six vehicles so far, and plans to use the new cash to make more.

We're excited to watch how autonomous delivery unfolds — especially since only three percent of grocery sales in the U.S. are currently happening online. 😳

What happens when social media is your 9-5? And nights? And weekends?

We recently spoke with Taylor Lorenz on Product Hunt Radio to find out. As part of her day-to-day as a staff writer at The Atlantic, Taylor cruises around different social platforms and follows crazy ideas down rabbit holes to find her stories. Most recently, she’s written about the financials behind the world-record Instagram egg, pretty Instagram meme accounts and the Instagram-husband revolution.

The overall theme to Taylor’s reporting is how tech affects people’s ability to communicate. We asked her about her favorite products right now and any sage advice she may have for alllll the social media dwellers.

---

I’m a reporter at The Atlantic and I write about internet culture. That includes things like social media-related coverage, trends, influencers, communities and any weird emerging things on the internet.

Overall, I have a very love/hate relationship with social media. In a sense, I feel like I owe my entire career and success to social media. I also feel like I found myself through social media — specifically on Tumblr. But then watching what Tumblr became and watching the company fall apart made me depressed about a lot of things on the internet.

I think I have more of an unhealthy relationship with social media because I spend too much time on it and don’t have a way to turn it off. But it is also good. I join everything — I’ll join whatever platform is out there.

Where I spend my time: My life is basically Instagram now and I spend a lot of time on Twitter because I’m a journalist. I’m also into a lot of other communities, specifically ones that are accessible to people. I like a lot of the Discord communities I’m in.

Where I spend my (free) time: I love horror movies. It’s the only thing I watch. But I’ve watched everything in the horror and sci-fi category on Netflix. So I use Shudder, which is a streaming service just for horror.

Product I love: Google Maps. Google Maps has built in all of these discovery mechanisms over the past year and they are amazing. It’s where I go to find everything. They have an explore tab where you can see lists and search by category. I location share too so I can see where people are.

Try this product: Lately I can't get enough of FlowState, a free daily newsletter that sends you two hours of perfect working music every morning. It gives you tons of background information on the artist and music genre. A paid membership gets you access to in-house custom mixes on Mondays and a searchable database of songs too. It's upped my productivity in a major way.

Request for product: A dumb phone that also has Google Maps.

Internet fun: I think TikTok is a fun place to spend time on the internet. If you haven’t been on there, you should try it out.

Social media advice: I think the most important thing is to recognize that sometimes it can feel like the entire internet hates you, or is ganging up on you, or is angry at you. It’s really important to remember that that’s not true, and that’s why you have to have a lot of good offline friendships too.

Remember the movie Her? It's the one that takes place in a near-future Los Angeles where Joaquin Phoenix develops a relationships with his artificially intelligent virtual assistant personified through a woman's (Scarlett Johansson's) voice.

That movie came out in 2013, and in 2019, it seems we're not far off from that imagined, futuristic world where we're confiding in virtual companions.

Yesterday, Voice Boloss launched on Product Hunt as an AI friend that you can FaceTime. It's from the same Makers that created Hugging Face, the “AI Tamagotchi,” back in 2017. A little on the Makers' backstory:

“We started to think about Voice Boloss when some of our users randomly tried to call or FaceTime the number we were using to send texts. When people form an emotional bond with their Hugging Face artificial intelligence, they want to communicate through all the mediums they are already using today with humans friends, like voice, call and FaceTime.” - Voice Boloss Maker Clément Delangue

And he's not wrong. People do want an emotional bond with robots.

“She's funny and loves emojis. I really like her” - Ali

“Just downloaded this last night. So much fun.” - Jonathan

“This is insane! Can’t wait to talk to my Animoji.” - Rhai

It's not hard to believe that popular operating systems of the future will be “characters.” We're already communicating with digital characters when we have a question, when we're driving, when we want to call a friend, etc. — they're called “Alexa,” “Siri” and “Google.” 🗣

But Siri's synthetic voice is still pretty robot-y and we — the humans — obviously want more. We want personality and soul. We want the Scarlett Johansson OS.

As it turns out that space, currently dubbed “synthetic media,” is heating up with the rise of computer-generated imagery and AI. Last year, it was Lil Miquela (now worth ~ $125M!). 😳And stealthy companies like Shadows, SuperPlastic and Toonstar are all reportedly developing their own virtual characters for social media. Not to mention there's already a myriad of ways you can express yourself through AR avatars like Memoji, Gabsee and Genies.

It's not hard to imagine our actual near-future blending all these developments together. Wanna FaceTime Lil Miquela?

Marie Kondo is in right now. The Japanese celebrity tidying consultant, author and eponymous star of Netflix's Tidying Up with Marie Kondo is making us all want to purge our homes of stuff we don't need.

But what if we need a digital purge? It's more than likely you're digital clutter has overflowed into:

a) 500 emails in your inbox 💌
b) 1,000 photos on your iPhone 📱
c) 5,000 files in your Dropbox 📦
d) 10,000 old tweets from your Twitter account 🐦

Luckily, a new tool called TokiMeki Unfollow launched this week to KonMari your Twitter feed. How it works: The app lets you go through all the people you follow from your account — one by one — displaying their most recent tweets. If the account sparks joy, keep following them. If it doesn't, thank them for the tweets and hit that unfollow button. ✌️

TokiMeki Unfollow — or Marie Kondo for Twitter — is part of the “Marie Kondo for X” effect we've seen growing across the webs. If the KonMari method for tidying your bedroom can can change your life, how can we organize, discard and spark joy across our digital footprint? Especially when the internet isn't always the most joyful place.

Here are a few suggestions — and don't forget to thank your discarded browser tabs along the way.

Marie Kondo for articles on the internet: Clear This Page lets you bypass ads, popups and other clutter on news sites.

Marie Kondo for your desktop: Clean automatically cleans your desktop every day.

Marie Kondo for your Mac: CleanMyMac X does all the essential cleaning on a Mac (and 5 million people already use it).

Marie Kondo for your Camera Roll: Gemini Photos uses machine learning to reduce iPhone clutter.

Marie Kondo for your inbox: KanBan Mail and Sortd for Gmail help you organize your email into boards and lists.

Marie Kondo for your browser tabs: Toby helps you sort your tabs into neat, visual lists.

Marie Kondo for your old tweets: Cardigan helps you find and delete old (embarrassing) tweets.