By the end of this week Lucasfilm shared the details of the first Star Wars live-action TV Series - The Mandalorian. The series is set between episodes six and seven and will be about a brand new Mandalorian character.
Jon Favreau will write and produces the 8 episodes, with Dave Filoni directing the first one. Additional episodes will be directed by Deborah Chow (Jessica Jones), Rick Famuyiwa (Dope), Bryce Dallas Howard (Solemates), and Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok).
I'm very exited about this. Especially about involvement of Dave Filoni, who basically created the Mandalorian culture for the Clone Wars. It is also amazing to hear that Filoni finally will be behind real camera. He is George Lucas' protege. Lucas tought him the art of storytelling and we saw the results of this in later episodes of the Clone Wars and though entire Rebels series, which to be honest was better than The Last Jedi and Han Solo movie.

Earlier this week, Microsoft refreshed its Surface lineup. I'm not going to the technical details of the upgrade, but I have to agree with Owen Williams, right now Microsoft has the best device lineup in the industry. They have device for everyone, from casual users, through tech enthusiasts, to the power users and content creators. This is something that Apple had 10 years ago and abandon by focusing on iPhones. Now, they have lineup with various outdated devices that are also expensive. I hope that Microsoft will not make the same mistake and, in 10 years time, the lineup will be as strong as today.

Speaking of mistakes, Microsoft has pulled the Windows 10 October update after reports of personal files being deleted. Microsoft is investigating the issue. The problem didn't affect everyone, but for now, it is good to wait with the upgrade.

Here is the list of interesting things.

"STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE" Animotion Trailer

DESIGN DB

Plans for the Next Iteration of Vue.js

Under the hood of Pixling World

Achieving impossible coding tasks without knowing how to do them

Day in the Life of a Google Product Manager

Image credits: Lucasfilm.

Weekly digest - 2018.39

1 October 2018

This week Google was celebrating its 20th birthday. September 27, 1998, this is the date when Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched their website - Google Search. Since then, Google has changed a lot. Google Search is now just a part of the tech giant now known as Alphabet.
After 20 years, some people see Google as the best company in the world, where others are convinced that Google is evil, spying on us in every possible way. I'm not sure whether Google is good or bad, probably both, but what I know is that Google during those 20 years has changed the world couple of times, and I'm sure it will be doing this in the future.

Elon Musk has been forced to step down as chairman of Tesla. This is the result of Musk's tweets about taking Tesla private. Those tweets, caused drastic price change of Tesla stocks. As Tesla ultimately has not been taken private, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Musk and Tesla for stock prices manipulation. On Saturday, Elon Musk has reached a settlement with the SOC and will step down as a chairman of Tesla and will have to pay $20 million fine, but will remain CEO of the company. Also, Tesla will have to pay $20 million fine. Both amounts will be later distributed over investors who lost money.
One tweet cost Elon Musk $40 million and his voice on the board. Lesson to take from this - be careful what you tweet.

Speaking of CEOs, Kathleen Kennedy will remain the president of the Lucasfilm for the next 3 years. For couple of months, there was a lot of rumors that Kennedy will be fired after disappointing Episode 8 and Han Solo movie.
Decision about keeping Kennedy goes inline with information about slowing Star Wars franchise down and Disney doesn't want any revolutions, which is a good thing.

That's it for this week, here is the list of interesting things.

20 years of Google Search

MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 Source Code

Marzipan: Porting iOS Apps to the Mac

Boost your productivity with macOS Mojave — enable Dark Mode for Xcode only

Pixel Art Tutorials of the month September 2018

I’m a Heart Doctor. Here’s Why I’m Wary of the New Apple Watch

Weekly digest - 2018.38

24 September 2018

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

Weekly digest - 2018.28

16 July 2018

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: