Weekly Digest - 2020.09

Weekly Digest - 2020.09

Safari will reject HTTPS certificates with over 13 months validity

Apple has announced that from September 1, Safari will reject any website that uses HTTPS certificate with more than 398 days of validity. Certificates issued before September 1 will not be affected until the date of their next certificate renewal.

ARM Macs in 2021?

According to Ming-Chi Kuo, first ARM Mac could be ready for sale in first half of 2021. Apple is working on ARM Mac for couple of years now, as part of switching from Intel processors to custom silicon chip. New CPU will not only allow Apple to become independent from Intel, which has been an issue in the past. But also will introduce more efficient silicon, which might result in better performance or/and battery life.

More Xbox Series X details

Phil Spencer shared couple of new details about upcoming console:

  • Xbox is powered by chips based on  latest AMD’s  Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures enabling 12TFLOPS of computing power,
  • Support for Variable Rate Shading (VRS) - instead of rendering all effects at the same frame rate, VRS will allow developers to apply different refresh rate to each of the effects,
  • Hardware-accelerated DirectX Raytracing will allow to achieve even more realistic computer graphics,
  • Quick resume will allow to resume multiple games from a suspended state almost instantly, thanks to fast SSD storage,
  • Dynamic Latency Input (DLI) will help to reduce lag between console and wireless controllers,
  • Support for 120FPS,
  • Support for HDMI 2.1.

Coronavirus affects tech conferences

Facebook announced that their annual developer conference - F8 - has been canceled due to coronavirus outbreak. F8 was scheduled to take place on May 5th and May 6th this year. Although, the conference will not take place, Facebook is planning to organize local and online events.

Also, Game Developer Conference (GDC), that was planned for this March,  has been postponed to this summer.

Weekly digest - 2019.26

Weekly digest - 2019.26

Flora Colossus

This week, I finally released the demo clip of the dancing Baby  Groot App or Flora Colossus for short. This is the project I wanted to do for almost a year and I'm super excited to share it with others.

Unfortunately,  this app will not be available to download, at least not in the foreseeable future. The main reason is licensing. I don't have any license/permission to distribute an app with Marvel's property. Even if the app passed Apple's review, it would be quickly taken down by Marvel/Disney.

Because of the licensing issues I prepared couple of clips demonstrating how Groot reacts to various music. You can watch and listen to full songs and theirs short versions.  

Jony Ive is leaving Apple

Johny Ive will depart from Apple and will start his own independent design firm - LoveFrom. Although Ive won't be Apple's employee,  he still will be working with Apple. Ive's current employer will be one of the LoveFrom’s primary client. Beside Apple, LoveFrom will work with other clients as well.

16-inch MacBook Pro

According to IHS Markit, the new model of the MacBook Pro will be unveiled during September's event.  IHS Markit also predicts a processor upgrade for the MacBook Air, and to the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Function Keys.

The September's release/unveil date for a new computer is a bit unusual and get me a little worried. Are the updates to new iPhones so meaningless,  that Apple has to show something new in form of a laptop?

Huawei Ban lifted

After the meeting with Chinese president, Donal Trump announced that Huawei trade ban will be lifted. The end of the trade ban means not only  that Huawei will be allowed to sell products in USA, but also US companies, like Intel, Qualcomm and Google, will be able to sell the hardware components and software to Huawei.

Despite the rumors that Huawei might be spying for Chinese government, I think   those are really good news. Huawei is one of the biggest companies in the world and their growth can certainly put pressure on other manufacturers, like Apple and Samsung, to make cheaper and/or better devices.

Weekly digest - 2018.33

Weekly digest - 2018.33

This week pasted mostly on discussion about future of the Twitter. On August 16th, Twitter removed streaming APIs which most of the 3rd party Twitter clients relied on. They've done that without providing any substitute, so now the 3rd party clients are missing key functionalities like real time notifications. This of course pissed a lot of people off and was interpreted as a di*k move to force user to use either web or crappy PWA clients. It also restarted the debate about future of the Twitter itself because this is not first time when Twitter has made a questionable decision. From many opinions I read, I completely agree with Sarah Perez:

Perhaps, users want a consistent experience — one that doesn’t involve a million inconsequential product changes like turning stars to hearts or changing the character counter to a circle. Maybe they appreciate the fact that the third parties seem to understand what Twitter is better than Twitter itself does: Twitter has always been about a real-time stream of information. It’s not meant to be another Facebook-style algorithmic News Feed. The third-party clients respect that. Twitter does not.

And I believe this is the core of the problem. If we look back at all the (questionable) changes that Twitter made, e.g.: algorithm driven timeline instead of chronological one, it looks like Twitter's management at all cost tries to make a clone of the Facebook. They are completely missing the point that Twitter was different idea and had different purpose.
In my opinion, if Twitter continues doing this, sooner or later, it will hit rock bottom. This is why I started looking for alternatives. Right now people are moving to Mastodon - the decentralized Twitter alternative. I joined it to see how it is going to evolve. You can find me there @mtynior.

From the other news. This week Motorola released new P30 Smartphone, which looks like iPhone X. Actually this is iPhone X, those phone are identical. Something tells me there is a lawsuit in the air...

Also this week, Lucasfilm and Disney released first trailer for upcoming TV series - Star Wars Resistance. My first impression was that it looks very cartoonish. But for now, I will not judge it. I was also skeptical after watching the first trailer of the Start Wars Rebels. And it turned out to be better than most of the Hollywood blockbusters.

Finally, here is list of interesting things.

Unreal Academy

The 2018 Game Developer Roadmap

The Productivity Stack

How to launch a side project in 10 days

GRID: A simple visual cheatsheet for CSS Grid Layout

Lessons from a small Firebase project

How to build a single page application using server-side Blazor