November Apple Event

Apple announced their November event, which will focus on ARM based Macs. According to latest rumors, we should see a new MacBook Air as well as 13 and 16 inch MacBook Pros. Although ARM powered MacBook Air is no brainer, the release of the Pro models would be a bold move from Apple. It would mean that first generation of new processors is  (at least) as powerful as current generation of Intel ones.

Dope links

• XCFrameworks — New Format for Packaging Frameworks in iOS
• The lang attribute: browsers telling lies, telling sweet little lies
• Mediator Pattern in ASP.NET Core Applications
• Understanding Jetpack Compose - Part 1 & Part 2
• grep.app - Search across a half million git repos
• Soccer match ruined when AI-controlled camera mistakes ref’s bald head for ball

Image credits: Łukasz Łada

Microsoft's Surface event

Here’s a quick recap of everything Microsoft announced this week.

Surface Laptop 3

Refreshed Surface Laptop lineup got USB-C and, for the first time, an AMD Ryzen 7 processor. Additionally, the device now comes not only with 13.5-inch screen, but with 15-inch version as well.

The Surface Laptop 3 starts at $999 for the 13.5-inch version and $1,199 for the bigger one.

Surface Pro 7

Beside newer processor and support for USB-C there is nothing new. Although, Microsoft has slashed the price by $150, and new model starts at $749.

Surface Pro X

This is a brand new model in Surface Pro lineup. It is slightly bigger with 13-inch screen, but it is 3mm thiner than Surface Pro 7. It has ARM-based Microsoft SQ1 chip and swappable SSD storage.

The Surface Pro X starts at $999.

Surface Neo

Surface Neo is dual-screen PC, powered by Intel's Lakefield processor. Each screen is about 9-inches and both add up to a 13.1-inch total display size. New device comes with a USB-C port and supports the Surface Pen,

The most interesting part is a keyboard that folds over one of the screens. When you dock the hardware keyboard, Neo recognises that, and the part that is not covered by keyboard becomes a smart input area. Microsoft is calling it the Wonderbar.

All of that is possible because Surface Neo is running a special version of Windows called Windows 10X.

Surface Neo will be available in 2020.

Surface Duo

Surface Duo is dual-screen phone that runs Android. Each screen is 5.6-inches and both add up to a 8-inch total display size. All of that is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chip.

Surface Duo will be available holiday 2020

Surface Earbuds

Microsoft announced a new pair of wireless Surface Earbuds that supports voice commands. They work with all the major virtual assistants:  Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana and Bixby. They can also translate speech in real time into around 60 languages.

The Surface Earbuds will be available later this year for $249.

Interesting links

• What’s New In ARKit 3?
• Error Handling in Swift Combine Framework
• Swift Memory Management and Performance
• Swift 5 replaces IntroSort with TimSort in the 'sort()' method
• Building a Scrapbook Layout with CSS Grid
• An HTML Element Potentially Worth $18M to Indiegogo Campaigns
• Amazon's Beautifully Designed And Failed Three vs. Two Column Layout Experiment
• Building Your Color Palette
• Multi-Agent Hide and Seek
  

Image credits: Microsoft

Deepfakes becomes real

Researchers from Samsung’s AI Center have figured out a method to train the AI to animate a person's face from an extremely limited dataset, like a single photo. They achieved this by training algorithm for detecting facial features and face landmarks, like shape of the face, eyes, mouth shape, etc. They used 7,000 images of celebrities gathered from VoxCeleb to train the model and achieve realistic results.

What they achieve is really impressive and scary at the same time. I'm afraid that soon we will have problem to tell the difference between what's real and what's fake.

Facebook & cryptocurrency

According to BBC, Facebook plans to launch its own cryptocurrency in 2020. New digital currency, named GlobalCoin, will be launched in 12 countries and it suppose to make money transfers easier for Instagram and WhatsApp users.

This is an interesting approach, and it's completely different from Apple's "traditional banking" route. I'm curious how it will be adopted by users. Maybe, finally, the cryptocurrency money transfers will become widely used.

iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 rumors

One week before WWDC, Guilherme Rambo revealed screenshots of some upcoming iOS 13 features. So far, the following changes will released with new operating system:

• Dark mode,
• New toolbar for screenshots editor,
• Redesigned Reminders app,
• Find my iPhone and Find my Friends apps are united into one app called Find My.

On the macOS side, we got screenshot of new Music and TV apps.

Those features align with previous rumors about iOS 13 and macOS 10.15, so there is high chance that we will see the rest of anticipated features on Monday.

New iPod Touch

Apple has quietly updated the iPod Touch with new A10 Fusion chip. Beside new CPU, iPod got new version with  256GB of storage. And that's it. This update is strange as Apple didn't even use latest generation of  A11 or A12 chips.

I'm surprised that Apple even bothered to upgrade iPod Touch, but apparently  they are convinced that users need more performance. Maybe they think that people will use iPods to play games, for example from Apple Arcade. Well, iPod Touch, with starting price at $199, is definitely chipper than the iPhone, so they might be people who like mobile games, but cannot afford a new iPhone. In that case, iPod Touch is reasonable choice.

Interesting links

• What Marzipan Might Mean for Accessibility
• Marketing for Engineers
• MafiaList - List of companies founded by X-Company employees
• We just moved off of Medium and onto freeCodeCamp News
• endoflife.date

Image credits: Egor Zakharov

The main event of this week was the launch and docking of the SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. Capsule was launched to orbit on Saturday with Falcon 9 rocket. The launch was perfect, capsule has been deployed to orbit and the couple minutes later, rocket booster landed on the drone ship in the Atlantic becoming SpaceX's 35th successful landing.
In the meantime, the Crew Dragon capsule was on its way to ISS. On Sunday capsule reached the station and docked by itself to International Docking Adapter. During its stay, the crew members of the Space Station will perform various tests on the capsule to see how it performs in the space. Nasa and SpaceX plans to return capsule to Earth on Friday.
This mission is a final test of the Crew Dragon. If this mission is successful, we will be one step closer to real mission with the crew on board, which is scheduled for July this year.

That all folks. If you want more interesting things check this list out.

Learning about .NET Core futures by poking around at David Fowler's GitHub

An awesome guide on how to build RESTful APIs with ASP.NET Core

Scott Hanselman & Damian Edwards Talk about Microsoft & .Net Core 3

The Complete Guide to SCSS/SASS

Mask Compositing: The Crash Course

How “defer” operator in Swift actually works

Data structures to name-drop when you want to sound smart in an interview

How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

Role of colour in UI

How to recognize fake AI-generated images

Image credits: Nasa.