During this week I looked back on what happened this year and I decided to pick my top 3 news from each month. Here are my picks.

January

1. Bitcoin bubble burst,
2. Meltdown and Spectre discovered,
3. EA became scared of YouTubers.

February

1. SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy into space,
2. Elon Musk started selling not a Flamethrowers,
3. Apple started selling HomePods.

March

1. Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal,
2. Apple fixed buggy iPhone X ad before fixing the actual iOS 11 bug,
3. Current frequency deviations in Central Europe.

April

1. Mark Zuckerberg testified before members of Congress,
2. SpaceX reached the promised land of launching every two weeks,
3. GTA V has become the most profitable entertainment product of all time.

May

1. Google Duplex has been announced,
2. GDPR has become effective,
3. Premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

June

1. Microsoft bought GitHub,
2. Apple held WWDC,
3. Apple Pay became available in Poland.

July

1. Apple updated MacBook Pros,
2. New MacBook Pros fixed keyboard but overheats,
3. Clone Wars TV series has been renewed.

August

1. Apple became first IT company to be worth 1 trillion dollars,
2. Twitter limited access to the APIs,
3. CD Project released first gameplay of the Cyberpunk 2077.

September

1. Apple unveiled iPhone XS, XR and Apple Watch 4,
2. Google was celebrating its 20th birthday,
3. iOS 12 and macOS Mojave has been released.

October

1. LucasFilm shared details about first Star Wars tv series - The Mandalorian,
2. Apple shoved new iPad Pro,
3. Google unveiled Pixel 3, a tablet and HomeHub.

November

1. Disney announced new streaming service - Disney+,
2. Stan Lee has passed away,
3. Robert Kubica returned to F1.

December

1. Microsoft announced that it's working on a new browser,
2. YouTube Rewind 2018 became the most disliked video on YouTube,
3. Google’s Home Alone ad.

That's all folks. This was an incredible year. I hope next year will be event better.
Happy New year guys and see you soon!

Image credits: Annie Spratt.

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.

Last time I talked about possible premiere of the new MacBook Pros. One week later, Apple refreshed MacBook Pros with new processors, more RAM options, True Tone display (on some models), and new third-generation keyboard.
The basic configuration of the 15' MacBook Pro contains:

• 2.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz, with 9MB shared L3 cache
• 16GB of 2400MHz DDR4
• Radeon Pro 555X with 4GB of GDDR5
• 256GB SSD
• True Tone Retina display

and costs $2,399. The maxed out configuration has:

• 2.9GHz 6-core Intel Core i9, Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz, with 12MB shared L3 cache
• 32GB of 2400MHz DDR4
• Radeon Pro 560X with 4GB of GDDR5
• 4TB SSD
• True Tone Retina display

and costs stunning $6,699. Without a doubt the specifications are impressive, but we will need to wait for the benchmarks, to verify whether the new laptops are as powerful as Apple claims. The last thing that remains the mystery is whether a new keyboard fixed issues of its predecessor. Apple only mentioned that the new keyboard is quieter, but latest teardown from iFixit suggest that included silicone membrane might protect against key failure.

Earlier this week, we heard the rumors that Apple plans to deploy the 1Password application to all 100,000 employees. There were also rumors that Apple is going to acquire the 1Password, which has been denied in quite specific way.
I'm using 1Password for couple of years now, and I would love to see it integrated into the operating system, but on the other hand 1Pasword is not only the macOS or iOS app, it also runs on Android and Windows. So it would be a shame to loose such a good app from those platforms.

Apple is not the only company that showed new hardware. Microsoft has presented the Surface Go, a smaller, less powerful version of the Surface Pro. New tablet features a 10-inch screen, integrated kickstand and Windows 10. Basic model that starts at $399 contains:

• Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y (1.6GHz)
• 4GB 1866MHz LPDDR3 RAM
• Intel HD 615 GPU
• Storage: 64GB eMMC
• Display: 10-inch (3:2 aspect) 1800 x 1200
• Camera: 5MP front-facing with Windows Hello, and 8MP rear auto-focus
• Up to 9 hours battery

I must admit that the price and spec are impressive. The closest competitor - iPad Pro 10' with 64GB of storage - costs $649.

I must admit, it was quite eventful week, but in the meantime, I managed to find couple of interesting articles:

REVERSE ENGINEERING WIPEOUT (PSX)

Mobile UI Design Trends In 2018

Make your app accessible for everyone

Cross Platform Mobile Apps with .NET and Uno

Building an Animated Slider 

Build VueTube: A Youtube Clone with VueJS, Webpack and Flexbox

Image credits: Apple.

The silly season continues. Let's start with news from Microsoft.
It looks like Microsoft postponed the premiere of the Andromeda device to unspecified feature.
Andromeda is a codename for foldable device that supposed to blur the line between phone, tablet and PC. It looks like the reason for this delay is that the Andromeda OS is not ready. It is disappointing to hear that we will not see probably revolutionary device in the near future. On the other hand it is good that they are not going to release unfinished product.

This week we also got rumors that Microsoft is going to release Surface Go later this year. Surface Go is a tablet device that suppose to compete with Apple's iPads. If Microsoft is going to do as good job as they did with Surface Books and Pros, they might have a really good chance to take a chunk of the market share.

As we are on topic of new hardware. Apple registered five new iPads and Macs in Eurasion Database. Previously, the new additions to the database preceded the premieres, which took place about a month later. It would be unusual for Apple to have an special event in August, last one we had 11 years ago, so we will probably see those devices in September or they will be released without any special keynote.
Regardless of the release date we are getting new hardware. The three of the new MacBooks are probably from the Pro series, where the remaining two might be the MacBook Airs. As for the iPads, we should see new iPad Pros with Face ID.

It looks like Gmail Developers and third party companies have been reading our emails. It is very similar case as with Facebook. If we allowed an application to have access to our email account, the developers of this app could read our emails.
One of the involved companies explained that humans have been reading emails only to improve machine learning algorithms. It is a common practice that’s gone largely unnoticed, because most of the people doesn't even realise how much information they provide to 3rd party companies, by providing access to an account.

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

Explore the world of passports by country

.NET Core Microservices – DShop

Introducing the Single Element Pattern

How I automated my job with Node.js

Starter template for a MEVN (MongoDB, Express, Vue, Node) Stack Application. (Part 1)

React Native: A retrospective from the mobile-engineering team at Udacity

WWDC 2018 for iOS developers: Siri Shortcuts

Using Step Builder Pattern in Swift

15 Years Ago, I Went Indie and Didn’t Know It.

Image credits: David Breyer.