Weekly digest - 2018.25

Weekly digest - 2018.25

This week Apple launched Apple Pay in Poland. Customers of 9 Polish banks can add their Mastercard and Visa cards to the Wallet app. According to Polish media, the launch itself was huge success, outclassing Google Pay.
I personally started using Apple Pay almost everywhere. I also started thinking about leaving all plastic cards at home, especially when Apple Pay is more secure.

Speaking of Apple, they finally acknowledged that new MacBooks have keyboard issues.
They launched new service program for users that have issues with sticky, repeated characters or unresponsive keys. The fix is free and if someone already paid for keyboard repair will get a refund.
I'm glad that those keyboards shenanigans are over. Now, I only hope that keyboard in MacBooks will be better than current implementation.

Apple also announced that iOS 12 will automatically share caller's location with 911. This is huge and possibly can save many lives. I hope the same mechanism will be soon implemented in other countries.

We had a lot of Apple news this week, so here is the list of other interesting things:

React Native at Airbnb
This is must read for anyone interested in React Native and cross platform development!

Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb

Create A Live Comment Feed with Pusher and Gatsby (React + GraphQL + Node.js)

NES Emulator for Swift Playgrounds

Writing good bug reports

Advanced Swift Debugging for UIKit

Custom UIView in Swift done right

The Story Behind Susan Kare’s Iconic Design Work for Apple

How to Lose an IT Job in 10 Minutes

Weekly digest - 2018.22

Weekly digest - 2018.22

This week was boring, nothing special happened. From worth mentioning events we have:

Also so this week we had plenty of rumors covering all things that we might see during Apple's WWDC:

  • iOS 12 - it looks like, that in the next version of the iOS, Apple has focused on stability and performance improvements. In terms of new features, we should see new animojis, more augmented reality and hopefully improved Siri.
  • macOS 10.14 - the new Mac operating system probably will be called Mojavi. It will have dark mode. Base on warnings for 32-bit apps in macOS 10.13, the new version should be 64-bit only. There was also plenty of rumors about project marzipan, which supposed to allow as to run iOS apps on macOS, but personally I doubt we will see it this year.
  • watchOS 5 - there are not much rumors about this one. My only wish is to get ability to create custom faces.
  • Macs - knowing that Apple is planning to release new Macs next year so I don't expect to see anything new in terms of hardware. What we might get is just small refresh of current line and maybe Apple will tease a new hardware like they did last year with iMac Pro.

Of course we will also get new developer tools, with new Xcode 10, and plenty new frameworks. Tomorrow we will see which of those rumors were true and which were just our wishful thinking.

Finally, here is a list of interesting articles:

Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb

Advanced Swift Debugging for UIKit

Custom UIView in Swift done right

An iOS architecture approach for UIViewController states & error management in Swift

Weekly digest - 2018.12

Weekly digest - 2018.12

This week was mostly about Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. Long story short, Cambridge had copies of private data for about 50 million Facebook users. Cambridge supposed to delete that data in 2015. What is even more interesting the Cambridge Analytica was involved in Donald Trump's presidential campaign which could influence the outcome of presidential election.
One thing is sure, Facebook will have to explain why Cambridge Analytica still had access to users data and how much Facebook actually care about user privacy.

On the bright side, the GDC 2018 took place. It is mostly about sessions, but we got a few cool technical demonstrations like Real-Time Ray Tracing Star Wars Demo or digital human performances from Siren and Andy Serkins.

Also Apple fixed buggy iPhone X ad before fixing the actual iOS 11 bug. This perfectly shows current mindset of Apple - lets fix the glitch in the ad instead of actual bug.

And finally, here is the list of interesting articles.

Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
This is really interesting paper about how Windows 95 user interface evolved and came to life. I must admit i felt nostalgic after reading it.

The most powerful tips to help you get a remote job
If you are a remote worker or you want to become one then this article is for you.

A complete introduction to Apollo, the GraphQL toolkit
GraphQL is getting more and more popular. And it looks like, it is just the matter of time that it will become more popular than REST. This article explains the basics, so if you never used GraphQL or Apollo before, you should check this out.

iOS Subscriptions are Hard
Jacob explains how to properly implement subscription mechanism in iOS app.

How to make a poster for Avengers: Infinity War in HTML and CSS
This is tutorial explains how to create cool looking website using just HTML and CSS.

The secret world of NSTimer
Nice explanation of inner workings of NSTimer.


Image credits: Facebook.