This week was one of the most uneventful weeks of this year. There is no a single story that might deserve more detailed coverage. In this situation, I decided just to listed news that might be somewhat interesting.

Samsung teases foldable phone. This phone is suppose to have foldable/blendable screen and will be released later this year under Galaxy brand.

Amazon passed a market value of $1 trillion. Amazon was competing with Apple to be the first IT company to pass $1T mark. Apple won this battle couple weeks ago. Nevertheless it's still impressive how company that couldn't afford a proper desk is now one of the most valued companies in the world.

Looks like Evernote is in trouble. First Evernote raised prices. Now is slashing prices for premium annual plans. In a meanwhile many executives left company. It does not look good. Especially when there are cheaper alternatives that offers the same or even better functionality.

Fortnite for Android has been downloaded 15 million times. The Android version was released just couple weeks ago and now it reached 15M downloads. Not to mention, it was achieved without Google Play. Impressive, most impressive.

Logitech will release alternative for Apple Pencil. Stylus will be available on September 12 for $69. I'm wondering whether this is confirmation of the rumors that new iPhones will support styluses. To be honest, it does not matter that much, because it's good to see more affordable alternative for quite expensive Apple Pencil.

Finally, here is list of interesting things.

Stop future proofing software

How Image Optimization Decreased my Website’s Page Weight by 62%

Most common Git mistakes and how to fix them

JavaScript ES6: Classes

Medieval Fantasy City Generator

Image credits: Mehdi-Thomas BOUTDARINE.

This week CD Project Red publish 48-minutes long walkthrough of the Cyberpunk 2077.
I have to admit that after E3 trailer I was a little bit skeptical. The world seemed to be too bright, clean and sterile for cyberpunk world. I was expecting dark, brutal world. Now, after watching the walkthrough I know I was wrong. This game look phenomenal. CD Project took their on spin on cyberpunk genre and it works great. It looks like the trailer showed us only a glimpse of the "civilized" world, where the rest, that we could see in the walkthrough, is shady and dark. And what is more important, the world looks natural and alive.
The other concern I had was the RPG aspect of the game. Gameplay proves that we'll get not only multiple storyline options that probably affects entire game, but also a lot of options to customize your character. The way how we customize the character significantly affects the way we can solve the quest and our character's combat abilities.
Speaking of combat. I was really interested to see how company that for over 10 years was making a "sword simulator" switches to guns. And boy, it is incredible. Reds know what they doing.
They also know how to phase the storyline. I know we saw only the main quest, but one step led to another. And it didn't feel that I'm wasting time wandering around just to increase the gameplay hours.
Overall, the game looks phenomenal and if CD Project keeps this level of quality across entire game, we will not only get great game but maybe even one of the best games ever.
I know, you probably thinking that I'm to exited. Let's face it, all we have is early gameplay and a lot of things can change. But looking at CD Project's records of delivering high quality products, I'm quite confident this game will be awesome.

This it is. Finally, here is list of interesting things.

How privacy-friendly is your site?

The Amazing Life-size LEGO Technic Bugatti Chiron that DRIVES! and how it was made

The art of designing accessible websites

How We Wrote a Self-Hacking Game in C++

I've created Icons and Illustrations which you guys can use 100% free

Image credits: CD Project Red.

This week Nvidia unveiled the new GeForce RTX 2000 series of graphics cards at Gamescom. New series is a long-awaited successor of GTX 1000 series. Based on new Turing architecture, the RTX 2080 is a big step forward into achieving real-time ray-tracing effects in games. Beside new effects, Nvidia also promises a 6 times more performance comparing to previous generation of GPUs.
Cards were available for preorder with shipment scheduled for 20th of September. The reference pricing for the cards is following:

• RTX 2070 is $499
• RTX 2080 is $699
• RTX 2080 Ti is $999
• RTX 2070 Founders Edition is $599
• RTX 2080 Founders Edition is $799
• RTX 2080 Founders Edition Ti is $1,199

Despite the high prices, all cards are already sold out. And thanks to crypto-miners, I would not expect to see them available before premiere or with lower prices.

This is it for this week. Before you leave, please check this list of interesting things out.

The 10 Secrets to Indie Game Success (and Why They Do Not Exist)

This is Windows 95, running in an Electron app

Splash - A fast, lightweight and flexible Swift syntax highlighter for blogs, tools and fun!

The Firebase Database For SQL Developers Series

How you can style your terminal like Medium, freeCodeCamp, or any way you want

Lolcat, Colorls, Catpix, and other Ruby Gems to add color to your terminal

Image credits: Nvidia.

This week pasted mostly on discussion about future of the Twitter. On August 16th, Twitter removed streaming APIs which most of the 3rd party Twitter clients relied on. They've done that without providing any substitute, so now the 3rd party clients are missing key functionalities like real time notifications. This of course pissed a lot of people off and was interpreted as a di*k move to force user to use either web or crappy PWA clients. It also restarted the debate about future of the Twitter itself because this is not first time when Twitter has made a questionable decision. From many opinions I read, I completely agree with Sarah Perez:

Perhaps, users want a consistent experience — one that doesn’t involve a million inconsequential product changes like turning stars to hearts or changing the character counter to a circle. Maybe they appreciate the fact that the third parties seem to understand what Twitter is better than Twitter itself does: Twitter has always been about a real-time stream of information. It’s not meant to be another Facebook-style algorithmic News Feed. The third-party clients respect that. Twitter does not.

And I believe this is the core of the problem. If we look back at all the (questionable) changes that Twitter made, e.g.: algorithm driven timeline instead of chronological one, it looks like Twitter's management at all cost tries to make a clone of the Facebook. They are completely missing the point that Twitter was different idea and had different purpose.
In my opinion, if Twitter continues doing this, sooner or later, it will hit rock bottom. This is why I started looking for alternatives. Right now people are moving to Mastodon - the decentralized Twitter alternative. I joined it to see how it is going to evolve. You can find me there @mtynior.

From the other news. This week Motorola released new P30 Smartphone, which looks like iPhone X. Actually this is iPhone X, those phone are identical. Something tells me there is a lawsuit in the air...

Also this week, Lucasfilm and Disney released first trailer for upcoming TV series - Star Wars Resistance. My first impression was that it looks very cartoonish. But for now, I will not judge it. I was also skeptical after watching the first trailer of the Start Wars Rebels. And it turned out to be better than most of the Hollywood blockbusters.

Finally, here is list of interesting things.

Unreal Academy

The 2018 Game Developer Roadmap

The Productivity Stack

How to launch a side project in 10 days

GRID: A simple visual cheatsheet for CSS Grid Layout

Lessons from a small Firebase project

How to build a single page application using server-side Blazor

This week was really uneventful. The only interesting thing was the Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 event, where new Note 9 has been announced, as well as new smart speaker - Galaxy Home. Also, Samsung has rebranded the Gear watches into Galaxy Watches so now we have entire Galaxy family of devices.
Samsung has also announced the partnership with Spotify. Now Samsung users can make Spotify the default music player across its devices.

Speaking of Samsung. One of the most popular games of last couple of months - Fortnite - was launched on Android... exclusively on recent Samsung Galaxy devices.
Last week we got news that Fortnite is not going to be available through Google Play Store. This week Epic Games dropped the bomb that it will be Samsung's exclusive at launch.
The rumors say that the exclusivity will last less than a month, but it still feels wrong.

That's it. As I said this was uneventful week. Now, the only thing left is to share the list of interesting articles.

Ray Tracing - Part 1

DX12 Ray Tracing Tutorials

Building Fluid Interfaces

Vue CLI 3.0 is here!

How I Built a Google Docs Imitation

Argon - A beautiful Design System for Bootstrap 4

Image credits: Samsung.