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.

This week Apple became first IT company to be worth 1 trillion dollars.
This happened after the jump in Apple's stock after reports of strong Q3 earnings that surpass both Apple's projections and analysts' estimates.
Lets face it, Apple only passed psychological barrier, there is no difference between company worth 999B and 1T dollars. In both cases this is unrealistic amount of money. But it is amazing to see how company that 20 years ago was on the verge of bankruptcy now is most valuable company in the world.
Also, it looks like Apple won't be there alone, because Amazon is on the verge of passing the 1 trillion mark. Which is not a surprise, for last couple of weeks, we saw a lot of news considering both Apple and Amazon to be first company to break 1 trillion barrier.

And here is list of interesting links.

Reading and Parsing NFC tag on iOS 11

NFC Reading on iOS 11 in 4 easy steps

NFC P2P NDEF Basics

Which self-hosted solutions are you using?

Should You Use NoSQL Or SQL Db Or Both?

5 steps to speed up your image heavy website

I created the exact same app in React and Vue. Here are the differences

React Authentication with Twitter, Google, Facebook and Github

As silly season continues, nothing really interesting happened. For me, the most interesting news was Apple's software fix for new MacBook Pros throttling issues. All new benchmarks show that fix helped and new laptop is able to maintain the base clock speed under heavy load.
That being said, the CPUs are still not able to reach their full potential because of insufficient cooling. But I think this is the price we have to pay for having slim design. Anyway, the new MacBook Pro is powerful machine that should satisfy any Pro user. Also, it is good to see that Apple took this issue seriously and released the fix so fast.

From the other news, Slack bought the HipChat and Stride from Atlassian. HipChat will be shut down and existing users will be migrated to Slack. Based on the statements from both companies, Slack is not eliminating the competitor, but rather teaming up with Atlassian on creating competition to Microsoft Teams. We will see what the future brings, but it is always good to see how companies are fighting for customers.

Now it's time for new from galaxy far, far away. Lucasfilm announced the cast of the Episode IX. The cast includes familiar faces: Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong’o, Domhnall Gleeson, Kelly Marie Tran, Joonas Suotamo, and Billie Lourd. Joining them are Naomi Ackie, Richard E. Grant, and Keri Russell. Also we will see the veterans: Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, and Billy Dee Williams, who will reprise his role as Lando Calrissian. Leia Organa will return! Once again played by Carrie Fisher. Filmmakers will use previously unreleased footage shot for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
The filming begin at London’s Pinewood Studios on August 1.

Finally, here is the list of interesting things.

Emulator 101

The Free Stack - Running your application for free on AWS

What Tech Stacks are Indie Hackers Using for Their Apps, and Why?

What every product designer should take away from Lyft’s new UI

Apple's design resources with UI elements from watchOS 5 and macOS 10.14

Creating a Markdown editor/previewer in Electron and Vue.js

DevCleaner - app for managing Xcode caches

Image credits: Lucasfilm.

Clone Wars is saved. During San Diego Comic Con, Disney and Lucasfilm announced that the Clone Wars TV series has been renewed.
In 2012, when Disney bought Lucasfilm, the show was canceled after season five. The first half of season six, that already has been done, has been released as "The Lost Missions" on Netflix; but we never got the proper ending. Lucasfilm tried to fill the gaps with books and another TV show - Star Wars Rebels, but still we have been missing the story of almost 1.5 season. In 2016 during Ahsoka’s Untold Tales Panel, series director Dave Filoni, shared what would happen, and it looks like, the new season will show this storyline.
New season will return, next year, with 12 all-new episodes on Disney's streaming platform.

One week after premiere of new MacBook Pro, people are still talking about it. That's because two reasons. First one is fixed keyboard. It looks like Apple finally solved the issue with faulty keyboards. The second reason is related with overheating Intel i9 CPU. Youtubers reveled that i9 MacBook Pro throttles on heavy load. There are plenty of videos showing and describing the problem, here is couple of them:

• MacBook Pro 15 (2018) - Beware the Core i9
• 2018 MacBook Pro i9 Thermal Throttling CONFIRMED!
• i9 Macbook Pro 2018: Hottest Laptop on the Planet!
• The New MacBook Pro Throttles?!?

For now it looks like, there is an issue only with i9 chips, and i7 version is fine. We will see what Apple will do about this particular problem.

Finally, here is the list of interesting things I stumbled upon this week:

8-bit Emulators

Learn how to work remotely

Building the Google Photos Web UI

How to build a typing indicator for your chat app in ASP.NET

How to get started with augmented reality in Swift, the easy way

Atomic Properties in Swift

Open Terminal from Xcode

Image credits: Lucasfilm.