A few weeks before the start of Black History Month, Apple released a new Black Unity Collection 2024 to support organizations in the United States that advocate for the rights of black people and that support them pro bono.

With the Black Unity Collection 2024, the tech giant is celebrating the strength and resilience of black people. Black Unity introduces new means of expression inspired by the incredible spirit and beauty of the black community.

Black History

The first of February marks the beginning of Black History Month, which honors the great contributions of the black community to U.S. history. During the month of February, America celebrates the achievements of African American men and women.

 

Black history brings with it much pain, injustice and cruelty. Years in which black people were slaves, humiliated and subjected to rampant harassment. All those wonderful men, women and children who were blamed and fingered simply because of the small amount or lack of melanin…

The symbols

The blossoming flowers and bright colors in Apple’s collection represent Pan-Africanism and symbolize generations working together to tackle injustice and break down systemic barriers. The Apple Watch Unity Bloom watch face features a beautiful floral design that signifies an ongoing commitment to striving for a more just world.

The surprises don’t end there. The watch has a feature that is triggered when you lift the wrist – the flowers begin to bloom and fill with vibrant hues.

iPhone and iPad owners can share their empathy and support with the new Unity Bloom wallpaper for their Lock Screen, which features an outline of flowers that fill with color when the display is turned on.

Beyond the visible

Many traditions, endless talent, incredibly beautiful art, strength, spirit, energy… Words are not enough to describe how incredibly talented and beautiful black people are! And with the talent and creativity Apple has shown us in this new collection, they have proven once again why they are among the best.

Pallets Releases New Major Versions of All Core Projects

Two years of hard work from the Pallets team and its many open source contributors has culminated in the release of new major versions for all six of its core projects:

• Flask 2.0
• Werkzeug 2.0
• Jinja 3.0
• Click 8.0
• ItsDangerous 2.0
• MarkupSafe 2.0

All six projects have dropped support for Python 2 and Python 3.5, making Python 3.6 the minimum supported version. Previously deprecated code has been removed, and some new deprecations have been added.

Some of the major changes affecting all six projects include:

• Renaming the default branch to main
• Adding comprehensive type annotations that make type checking user code more useful and provide better integrations with IDEs
• Using tools like pre-commit, Black, and Flake8 to enforce a consistent style across all of the codebases and new pull requests

Besides the sweeping changes listed above, individual projects have several attractive new features.

Jinja Gets Improved Async Environments

asyncio support in Jinja 2.x required a patching system as well as some caveats developers needed to keep in mind.

One of the reasons for this is that Jinja 2.x supports Python 2.7 and Python 3.5.

Now that all of the Pallets projects only support Python 3.6+, the patching system was removed to provide a more natural asyncio experience for projects using Jinja 3.0.

Click Gets an Overhauled Shell Tab Completion System

Building great command-line interfaces (CLI) for an application can be a chore. The Click project helps ease this burden with its friendly API.

One of the features shell users expect from a CLI is tab completion, which suggests command names, option names, and choice values when a user types a few characters and presses Tab.

PyCon US 2021 Connects Pythonistas Around the World

Late spring is always an exciting time for Pythonistas in the United States. PyCon US, the largest annual convention devoted to Python, traditionally takes place in April or May.

This year, PyCon US was a little bit different from previous conferences. Originally slated to take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, PyCon US 2021 transitioned to an online-only event due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

What’s Next for Python?

May was an eventful month for Python. At Real Python, we’re excited about Python’s future and can’t wait to see what new things are in store for us in June.