F8 2019 Conference

Last year's Facebook conference was shadowed by the Cambridge Analysis scandal. This year company told us that it is "focusing" on privacy. I'm not going to comment this, and I move on to other topic.

First of all the website will be completely redesigned.  It's about time to do so. Right now the site feels old and inconvenient. I only hope that Facebook will not force more "recommendation" algorithms. I know what I want to follow and in what order. So I would appreciate if Facebook stoped filtering the content for me.

Second thing are new versions of the Messenger. Beside size and speed optimisations it will have end-to-end encryption. Also, we will get the desktop versions for Windows and Mac.

From other news, Facebook said that it going to extend the dating features with secret crush. And Oculus Quest and Rift S will be released on May 21st.

Peter Mayhew passed away

Peter Mayhew, the original actor who portrayed Chewbacca in Star Wars, has died at the age of 74 on the evening of April 30.

This is a really sad news, yet another actor from original cast is gone ☹️

MacBook Pro Keyboard Failures

On Reddit, user named cli3x posted and interesting analysis of the MacBook keyboards failures. Long story short, it looks like the design of the butterfly switches is faulted and non of the upgrades Apple did, during last year and a half, are going to solve keyboard issues. This fragment sums this up perfectly:

Macbook owners, please beware. Always have AppleCare, even if paying extra to cover a flaw that should be properly dealt with is morally questionable and a shitty thing to do.

Firefox's "armagadd-on"

On Saturday, almost all Firefox's extensions stopped working.  It turned out that the signing certificate has expired. It took Firefox's team couple of hours to pinpoint and fix the issue. In a meanwhile, the workaround was to disable add-ons' certification validation.

Lesson from this incident is clear, always check when your certificates are about to expire and set a reminder in your calendar.

Interesting links

• A RealWorld Comparison of Front-End Frameworks with Benchmarks
• Tutorial - Shuffle a Deck of Cards in Vue.js
• How I configure VSCode for Everything
• Star Wars The Force Awakens - Original opening scene
• Every Marvel Movie Poster, Explained
• Hollywood Screenwriter Attempts To Write A Scene in 7 Minutes

Image credits: Facebook

Avengers Engame

This week, Marvel released the final chapter of the Avengers. This is a culmination of the story that was 11 years in a making and took 22 movies to tell. During that time those movies evolved from small experiment into pop-culture phenomenon. That being said, the directors, Russo brothers, had almost impossible task to finish all the stories,  meet fans' expectations and lay the foundation for the Phase 4.  I have to admit, I was worried whether they would be able to do it, but they did it. After watching it, I can say with certainty that this is the perfect culmination of the Marvel's Phase 1-3 movies. After leaving the cinema I was fulfilled. Russo brothers not only close the storyline, but they also incorporated so many references to previous movies and comics, that is was overwhelming.  Every nerd will have something to talk about for weeks.

This is not the perfect movie, but  it  gives us closure, and that was what I wanted from this movie.

Samsung Galaxy Fold

Last week I was writing about broken review units. This week we got first reviews and even a teardown. As I said last week, this phone is still a prototype with many small issues. They are not anything major, but it looks like they might be irritating in long run. I hope Samsung is taking notes and the next model will be true folded phone.

Another AirPods in 2019?

There are rumors that Apple will release a brand new AirPods later this year. New model is supposed to have a noise-canceling feature as well as new form-factor. Those rumors are really interesting especially after Apple's AirPods update in last March. Although, in March we go merely a hardware refresh, when all previous rumors hinted new colors, materials and features including noise-cancellation, so maybe we will get a brand new AirPods after all.

Interesting links

• Guide to the Star Wars' Alphabet Aurebesh
• The transition into Fisk Tower in Spider-Man's intro mission
• Introduction to WebAuthn API
• Crafting a Command Line Experience that Developers Love
• The downsides of JSON for config files
• What is a File Descriptor?
• Great developers are raised, not hired

As I mentioned last week, we had Star Wars Celebration. I've already covered Rise of Skywalker and  Jedi Fallen Order. Now, it's time to catch up with other news.

The Mandalorian

This is the first, beside Star Wars TV Special, live action Star Wars TV series, so I've been really excited for this panel. Unfortunately we have not learnt many details, but what have been leaked looks promising. It looks like we will get dark, greedy world that I love in Rogue One. And if Dave Filoni created the story on level of Rebels, we will get Netflix's quality show. Can't wait to 15th of November, when series will debut on Diney+.

Star Wars The Clone Wars

This panel haven't brought any surprises as most of the story have been already told one way or another, but at least we've got official trailer. Unfortunately we still don't know when it will be released.

Notre Dame

On Monday the Notre Dame cathedral burned down. Normally I would not cover such tragedy, but Ubisoft released Assassins Creed Unity, which featured the detailed recreation of the cathedral, for free. I thought it was cheap and low marketing action, but later on Ubisoft announced that they will give $500K for restoration process. Maybe it was a PR stunt, but at least those money will be used to something good.

Playstation 5

This week we got couple of details about next generation of Sony's console. Here is what we learnt, so far:

• It will not be released in 2019,
• 8-core CPU  based on AMD’s 3rd gen Ryzen (7nm Zen 2),
• GPU based on AMD’s Radeon Navi with support for  8K resolution and ray-tracing,
• Custom AMD chip for 3D audio,
• SSD storage,
• Backward compatibility with PS4 games,
• Physical drive, probably Blue-ray, but the type of the drive has not been confirmed.

So far it looks promising. The only thing that is a mystery now is pricing, but I think we will find it out next year.

Broken Samsung Galaxy Fold

Samsung has started shipping review units and multiple phones already broke after couple days of usage. I knew this device will be a prototype to see how this technology behaves and how people use foldable phones, but I didn't expect to see such problems before the premiere. Hopefully Samsung finds out the root of the problem and the next generation will not have such issues.

Crew Dragon anomaly

On Sunday SpaceX was doing static fire test of the Crew Dragon capsule, but something went wrong and vehicle exploded. At the moment we don't know why it happened and how is it going to affect the manned mission, originally planned for this July.

Interesting links

• Star Wars logos: the evolution of a film icon
• Star Wars Celebration is a Reminder That Fandom is Far Healthier, and Far More Positive, Than the Internet Would Lead You to Believe
• Easy CSS Animation With Transition & Transforms
• Cool uses of the ::before and ::after pseudoelements
• The Web Developer's Guide to DNS
• Introduction to Elasticsearch
• Four Startup Engineering Killers
• Original Apple wallpapers optimized for iPhone X
• Retro Tech: Game Boy

This week I want to try a different approach to weekly digest. Instead of trying to keep it as one coherent piece, today, I will break it into separate sections. I believe this will make it more clear to see what actually happened each week and it should also make writing it easier. Those are the goals I want to verify with this little experiment.

Powerbeats Pro

One weeks after Apple's new AirPods release, Beats announced new truly wireless Powerbeats Pro. We knew they were coming, but now it is official, and we have the launch date. They are coming in May, in 20 countries, for about $250. Here are some features of the new earbuds:

• up tp 9 hours of listening time,
• Apple's H1 chip with for quick connection and hands-free “Hey Siri”,
• Sweat and watter resistant,
• Physical and programmable control buttons,
• Automatic pause and resume,
• Charging case, which work similarly to AirPods' case,
• 23% smaller and 17% lighter than its predecessor,
• Come in 4 colors: Black, Ivory, Moss and Navy.

The are a little pricey, but I'm waiting for them.
I was waiting patiently for sport version of the AirPods, but they've never come. Also, when I was fitting the AirPods, they were loose in my ears, so they would probably fall during the training. Powerbeats doesn't have this problem as they were design for athletes.
Beside the price, there is one more thing I don't like. It is the lightning jack on the charging case. I really wished Apple/Beats would finally switched to USB-C with all their products.

Visual Studio 2019

Microsoft has released the next version of its main development IDE. For me, the new IntelliSense powered by an AI is mind-blowing. Also live sharing built into the IDE looks awesome. There are many more new features and improvements, which you can check here.

Cloudflare free VPN

Cloudflare has added free VPN into its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver app. What's interesting this is not a traditional VPN service. Usually the main reason we use VPNs it to trick websites and services into thinking wee are accessing them from a different location. That's no the case with Cloudflare’s service. Instead, the VPN works behind the scenes to increase speed and privacy.
This is different approach, but as long as it is keeping us safe I approve it.

List of interesting things

• VueSolitaire
• Super Charrio Kart
• Vue PWA example
• Vue.js Kanban Board Part I with PWA features in Part II
• How to Fix the Refresh Button When Using Service Workers
• Konami Code Fun: Adding Cheat Codes to your Website
• Libraries Used in the Top 100 iOS Apps
• 5 Tools To Speed Up Your App Development
• Why I Replaced Disqus and You Should Too
• The worst volume control UI in the world
• GDC 2019 Vault
• The Twelve-Factor App
• The first iPhone prototype: an exclusive look at Apple’s red M68
• The MacBook keyboard fiasco is way worse than Apple thinks
• Windows 10 Hero Desktop Image - Behind the Scenes
• Mathigon

Image credits: Apple.

This was definitely Apple's week. It all started on Monday with special event. This time it was focused on various services.

Let's start with Apple News+. Apple News has been around since 2015. The idea was to gather and curate high quality news and articles in a one place. And on the paper it sounds good, but it has never convinced me to jump on board and replace my RSS reader. Actually it was quite the opposite. But this time the Plus version looks interesting. For $9.99 a month we get access to 100 magazines, which is quite a good deal. Unfortunately there are 2 main issues with this service. First of all, for the foreseeable future, it will be available only in US and Canada. The second issue is the quality, right now those magazines are just PDFs, so there is no dynamic content we used have e.g. in iBooks or in some articles in standard Apple News.

The second service was a completely surprise. Apple introduced their own Credit card based on Apple Pay technology. The card has no additional charges and quite impressive cashback options.
This credit card sounded really nice and it would be if it was purely virtual. But Apple based this card on physical Mastercard. Don't get me wrong, this card is still really good deal especially with cashback rates, but I would love to see something even safer than traditional card connected to Apple Pay.

The next presented service was the Apple Arcade. This is game subscription which will allow to play various games without worrying about ads or microtransactions. It is something similar to Xbox Gold or PlayStation Plus. Nothing impressive here, just another way to make more money on AppStore.

The last service was Apple TV+. And we all knew what to expect here. Basically this is Apple take on Netflix. For now, Apple presented couple of original shows, with quite impressive group of people behind those series. So far they have Steven Spielberg, JJ Abrams and even Oprah Winfrey. We will see whether those shows will be worth watching.
Beside original shows, Apple TV+ will also allow, at least in US, to customize the list of TV channels we watch. Normally, we have to buy them in bundle, but here we will pay only for those channels we watch. This is cool idea and might bring quite a lot of people to Apple TV.
And the last thing, Apple TV is no longer a physical device, it will also be an app for iOS and macOS.

We all thought that the special event was the end of Apple related news for this week, but on Friday Apple announced that they canceled the AirPower mat. This was a big surprise, especially after all the teasing, code samples in iOS, and even recently the marketing materials.
Well it's sad to see that Apple was not able to pull off an engineering miracle, but it is good to see that Apple admitted the failure.

That's it for this week. If you are interested, please check out those cool things.

A web based Windows XP desktop recreation!

Why can't bots check “I am not a robot” checkboxes?

Build a Progressive Web App In VueJs, from Zero to Hero! Part I

Build a Progressive Web App In VueJs, from Zero to Hero! Part II — The Service Worker

Things nobody ever taught me about CSS

GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE 2019 LINKS

Marvel's Spider-Men Technical Postmortem

Q2VKPT

Image credits: T.C. Sottek.