During this week literally nothing happened. The only things worth mentioning are listed below.

1. Apple announced iPad Pro and Mac event for October 30th with really cool logo variants,
2. Apple started taking iPhone XR preorders in selected countries,
3. Google will start charging Android device makers a fee for using its apps in Europe.

That's really all, so if you are interested, please take a look at the following articles.

Using ASP.NET Core with MongoDB in containers for local dev, CosmosDB for production

How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source

5 Easy Steps to Understanding JSON Web Tokens (JWT)

How Font Awesome became the most funded software project on Kickstarter — and what we can learn from it

Motion Design Doesn’t Have to Be Hard

Stop building websites with infinite scroll!

Image credits: Apple.

At the beginning of this week, Apple finally released the iOS 12. The new version of the mobile operating system contains plenty new features and improvements:

• Better performance especially for displaying keyboard or opening apps,
• Better battery usage information
• Screen time - tool that allows to track how much time we spent using particular app,
• Grouped notifications - now, notification from the same app are grouped together,
• New Animiji and Memoji - I think this doesn't need explanation 😛,
• Grouped FaceTime - finally you can call multiple people,
• Improved AR capabilities including new Measure app or AR elements in the News app
• Shortcuts - tool for automating common task. With Siri this is very powerful, but so far underrated feature,
• Siri suggestions - Siri show suggest what can we do based on what are we currently doing,
• CarPlay supports third-party apps,
• Location is automatically shared with 911 and first responders,
• Do not disturb during bedtime - a new mode of the phone which will hide all notifications when we are sleeping,
• Password Manager API - this allows password managers to fill your passwords right from the keyboard without switching between apps.

This release is not revolutionary, but brings couple of long awaited improvements, so I encourage you to update your devices.

With premiere of the iOS 12, we also got a new Beta version of the next release. Of course people were looking for new leaks and they found couple of interesting thing about upcoming iPad Pro:

• No home button
• Face ID (with support for both portrait and landscape)
• No notch
• Probably USB-C port instead of lightning

If those rumors are true, then I can't wait to see new iPhone next year. Hopefully without notch and finally with USB-C.

On Tuesday, Marvel released first trailer of the Captain Marvel movie. Movie is set in 90s and tell the story of Kara Danvers, who becomes one of the most powerful superheros in Marvel universe.
Speaking of Marvel universe, Disney is planning Loki and Scarlet Witch TV shows. Also, there are rumors that Disney is planning to create more TV series for characters who don't have their own movies. If any show is created, it will be for upcoming Disney's streaming platform.
I must admit, creating a TV show in popular franchise is a great strategy for promoting the new streaming platform. Let's face it, Disney owns most of the franchises, so they have plenty of material to use. They already confirmed that there will be Star Wars TV show created by Jon Favreau.

As we are talking about Star Wars. Disney's CEO, Bog Iger, said that they are going to slow down with Star Wars franchise.
Since 2015 we had 4 movies. First two movies have been huge success, especially commercially. But last two have been disappointing, they felt rushed. They also, have been confusing for the fans because we had movies from the trilogy interspersed with with anthologies, where fans have been expecting continuation like in Marvel movies.
I love Star Wars, and I would love to see new movie every year, but if we can get movies that are better quality then I can wait.

Last but not least, here is the list of interesting things.

iOS 12: The MacStories Review

Microcopy Inspirations

Why does the Zune HD have the message “For our Princess” on the inside of the case, and why is she a princess?

Dependency Management for iOS projects with the Swift package manager

Code to go - Find up to date snippets for common JavaScript use cases

TinyLETTER

This week Apple held the Gather Round event introducing three new iPhones and new Apple Watch. Without further ado, let's start with iPhones.
The iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max are the premium models with the most features which also makes them the most expensive ones, starting at $999 and $1099 respectively. Here is the specification:

• OLED True Tone Screen
• HDR display
• Dual 12-megapixel rear cameras (wide-angle and telephoto lenses)
• 7-megapixel front camera
• Portrait Mode with Depth Control
• Smart HDR photos
• A12 Bionic chip
• Face ID
• Fast charging
• Qi-based wireless charging
• IP68-rated water resistance to a depth of 2 meters for up to 30 minutes
• 64GB / 256GB / 512GB of storage
• Dual SIM (Nano-SIM and eSIM)
• Gigabit-class LTE
• Voice over LTE (VoLTE)
• 802.11ac Wi‑Fi
• Bluetooth 5.0
• 3D Touch

iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max have almost identical tech specs. The differences come to battery life, XS Max has one-hour-longer battery life, and screen size. XS has 5.8-inch screen, where XS Max has a larger 6.5-inch version.

Apple also introduced a brand new version of the phone, called iPhone XR. It is more affordable, starting at $749. I must admit, for this price point the specs look impressive:

• LCD True Tone Screen
• HDR display
• Single 12-megapixel rear cameras (wide-angle lense)
• 7-megapixel front camera
• Portrait Mode with Depth Control
• Smart HDR photos
• A12 Bionic chip
• Face ID
• Fast charging
• Qi-based wireless charging
• IP68-rated water resistance to a depth of 2 meters for up to 30 minutes
• 64GB / 128GB / 256GB of storage
• Dual SIM (Nano-SIM and eSIM)
• LTE Advanced
• Voice over LTE (VoLTE)
• 802.11ac Wi‑Fi
• Bluetooth 5.0

As you can see, there is not much difference between XS and XR. If you are thinking about new iPhone and don't care about the OLED display and better camera you should choose the XR version. If you need better screen and camera, or if you need biggest screen then you have to pay $250 for XS model.

Now let's move on to Apple Watch. The version is called Series 4. The biggest change is over 30% larger screen. With bigger screen the case also got bigger by about 2mm. Looking at the thinness, Series 4 is about 1mm slimmer compared to predecessor. Here is the rest of the changes:

• 64-bit S4 processor, 2 times faster than S3
• Second-generation optical heart sensor
• ECG monitor
• New accelerometer (up to 32 g-forces) and gyroscope that can detect if person fall down
• Haptic feedback on the Digital Crown
• Louder speaker by 50%
• New W3 wireless chip
• Bluetooth 5.0

The new Apple Watch Series 4 is impressive and can't wait to finally get a proper start watch.

Last but not least, here is the list of interesting things.

Don’t Use Checkboxes

Your web app is bloated

.NET Conf 2018

How iOS Apps Adapt to the iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR Screen Sizes

The first month of being a freelance designer, how does it feel like?

Half-Life Recreated with Unreal Engine 4

Image credits: Apple.

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 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.