This week Apple released its new product - HomePod. It is a smartspeaker and costs 350$. Is it worth it? Well, it is hard to say because it is not available in Poland, but you can check out what others think here or here.

Staying on Apple related news. It looks like Apple is going to focus on bugs instead of adding new features to iOS 12. If those rumors are true, I can say only one thing - finally, Steven Sinofsky explained why.

Last week Falcon Heavy launch made a lot of fuss in the media. Thanks to this launch people starts to understand why SpaceX is doing thing the way it does.

And here is the list of interesting articles I stumble upon this week.

12 best practices for user account, authorization and password management
User authorization is hard. From this article you will learn how to do it properly so your users passwords doesn't leak.

30+ great UI Kits for iOS engineers
Lisa compiled a list of over 30 UI Kits for designers. This is a must read for every one who is doing mobile app desings.

3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae: Enjoy this Doom.xls file!
Someone wrote Doom like game engine in MS Excel because why not. Defenetly worth checking out.

Image credits: Apple.

Finally, after years of designing and building, SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy into space. The world's most powerful rocket took the Starman in a red Tesla in space while twin boosters landed near the launch site in Florida giving us unforgettable spectacle.
Although the mission achieved its primary goal - putting a cargo on its way to Mars, it wasn't fully successful. While the two side boosters landed simultaneously on the ground, the core one crashed into the ocean. At the moment, it looks like the booster was approaching the landing barge too fast and missed it by couple meters.
Despite this malfunction, we are one step closer from landing on Mars.

Lucasfilm released teaser trailer for upcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story. Despite all the fuss with switching directors in the middle of production, the movie seems to be good and interesting.

And now it's time for the list of interesting things I stumble upon this week.

Apple's Emoji Crackdown
Apple started rejecting iOS apps that use emojis in different places than text fields. I understand that Apple does own the copyright to its emoji font, but rejecting creative and good looking apps because they use emoji instead of normal words is the way to make developers go away from the platform.

Swift 4.1 improves Codable with keyDecodingStrategy
Swift came a long and bumpy road. I still remember how hard it was to parse JSON when Swift came out in 2014. In this article Paul Hadson give us a glimpse into the future and explains how easy it will be to parse JSON with Swift 4.1.

CloudKit: Structured Storage for Mobile Applications
This white paper gives the behind the scenes look into Apple's CloudKit.

PodsUpdater
Every iOS developer must heard of CocoaPods. Those who use it know that managing dependencies is difficult. This app makes our life a little bit easier.

Building .NET Core 2.0 web apps with Vue.js single file components using VS Code
Adam Marczak shows how to integrate Vue.js with Asp.NET Core 2.0

Image credits: SpaceX.

In this week we mostly lived by Elon Musk's Not a Flamethrowers that were sold out withing 48 hours.

Intel presented the roadmap of how they play to fix the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in the silicon chips.
Speaking of Spectre. Newest Windows patch allows to disable the Spectre microcode
fix.

Also after couple years of development, the Boostrap 4 has been finally released.

Last but not least, here is the list of interesting things I stumble upon this week.

2018 Developer Skills Report
HackerRank compiled a report on developer skills. There are some great insights, including: what are the developer's favorite languages and frameworks, how they get new skills, what developers want in a job.

Google doesn’t necessarily need innovation
This is follow up to the Why I left Google article.

How I review code
Code review is a controversial topic. We all should be doing it, but sometimes we
don't. There is a lot of reasons why - most common cause are deadlines, but sometimes we don't feel comfortable with it. This article explains how to do a human friendly review.

Parallel programming with Swift: Operations
Jan Olbrich explains basics of concurrency and parallel programing in Swift.

A better way to update UICollectionView data in Swift with diff framework
Dynamic content in UITableViews and UICollectionViews is quite difficult to achieve. This article explains how to do it properly.

How to get HTTPS working on your local development environment in 5 minute
Most of the websites are protected by HTTPS. If yours is not, it should be! From this article you will learn how to setup HTTPS on your local machine.

An introduction to Progressive Web Apps
Progressive Web Apps are the latest trend in mobile application development using web technologies. Flavio Copes explains the basics behind this concept.

Concepts
Concepts is sketching and design app for iOS. I don't have any drawing skills, but this app looks really impressive from UX point of view.

Image credits: Boring Company.

After busy begining of the year the last week of Junary was calm. I would even risk to say it was boring.
Cryptocurencies are still falling, but on the bright side, Space X finally performed static fire test of Falcon Heavy. Now we are waiting for launch, which is planned for 6th of February.

Beside this nothing much happend so let go stright to list of interesting articles.

Rest confusion explained
Follow up to the very popular and controversial Rest is the new SOAP article.

I am a 9-5 developer and so can you
We programmers spend to much time on coding. We love it, but we also need to know when to stop. In this article Matthew Jones explains how to reconcile private and professional life.

EA scared of youtubers
Recent events showed that gamers have enough of EA's bad practices. It looks like that EA is now scared of the opinions of prominent Youtubers.

How one person caused the price of cryptocurrencies to fall
It looks like, once again, lack of communication caused a catastrophe.

PWAs are coming to iOS 11.3: Cupertino, we have a problem
Apple added Service Workers to iOS 11.3. Those allow programmers to create Progressive Web Apps.

Why I left Google to join Grab
This article might seems to be another rant about "evil" Google, but actually it shows interesting point of view, where Google stopped to be innovative.

HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons
If you ever wonder how HTTPS works, here is human friendly explanation.

Create Guten Block Toolkit
This is zero-configuration dev-toolkit for developing WordPress Gutenberg blocks. Although it is a tool dedicated to WordPress, it has some interesting ideas that have a great chance of being adopted in other projects.

Codable enums in Swift
This article explains how to encode and decode enums with associated types.

Whopper Neutrality
This is brilliant. Burger King shows to ordinary people what is Net Neutrality.

Magnetic USB-C cable
If you're missing magsafe in new MacBooks, this is something that might interest you.

Image credits: SpaceX.

First two weeks of this year were quite busy. We had CPUs meltdowns, then we had
busy CES. Finally, this week was a normal one, at least for most of us. So, if you are not running for your life, check this list of interesting things I stumbled upon this week.

Making of Apple's emojis
10 years ago Angela Guzman was an intern at Apple. Today, she give us insight into how the Apple's emojis were created. It is really interesting to read how things we use every day became the reality.

CALayer tutorials
If you ever wonder how all those fancy iOS animations are made, this is the site for you. Shannon Potter wrote multiple in-depth tutorials explaining how to do them.

Nintendo Labo
Nintendo goes back to making toys. This time, it is going to make cardboard accessories to Nintendo Switch. It looks weird at the beginning, but actually it is clever combination of portable console and piece of cardboard.

Nintendo Switch Emulator
Speaking of Nintendo Switch. CEMU Emulator now supports Nintendo Switch. It supports one game, to be precise. Nevertheless, here you can see The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in stunning 4k 60fps!

GeForece Now - cloud gaming by Nvidia
Nvidia presented their own gaming service. It allow to play AAA games on your ordinary PC and Mac. At the moment, the service offers almost 150 games, including Star Wars Battlefront II, The Witcher 3 and PUBG. Pricing is still unknown, but you can try to get access to the free beta.

BeatSaber
Beat Saber is a VR rhythm game. I'm not a big fan of music games, but this one is impressive. Something tells me, this might be a hit 😉.

Star Wars Rebels Mid-Season 4 Trailer
After 4 seasons, Star Wars Rebels is coming to an end. Here is the official trailer of remaining episodes.

Image credits: Disney.