Apple Event at the end of March?

According to German site iPhone-ticker.de, Apple is going to hold a Media Event on March 31st. At this event Apple is supposed to unveil iPhone SE2 (iPhone 9), new iPad Pro and AirTag.

Windows 10 icons redesigned

Microsoft has started rolling out new colorful app icons in Windows 10. New Icons are part of the Fluent Design that Microsoft has been working for years now.  So far Mail and Calendar apps has been updated; rest of the core apps will be refreshed over upcoming months.

Android 11 Preview

Google has released first developer preview of the Android 11. At the moment preview is available only for selected Pixel phones.

Android 11 offers new capabilities for developers, like enhancements for foldables and 5G, call-screening APIs, new media and camera capabilities, machine learning, and more.

Dope Links

• Results of the iOS Developer Community Survey
• Tobias Due Munk - Prototyping Custom UI in SwiftUI
• Optional SwiftUI views
• Managing toolchains in Xcode
• Advanced localization techniques in Vue.js
• Vue.js: The Documentary -  Trailer
• The React Cheatsheet for 2020 📄‬ (+ real-world examples)
• GuiJS
• Add dark mode to your website with just a few lines of code
• DistroTest.net - The first online operating system tester

Cool tech at CES 2020

As always, the second week of January is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) week. I'm not going to cover in much details what has been shown, people on the site can do much better job. Instead, I've created a list of the most interesting gadgets & thing shown at CES 2020.

Mobile, portable & wearable devices

• OnePlus Concept One Phone
• Dell Alienware Concept UFO
• Withings Scanwatch

Laptops

• Intel's Horseshoe Bend concept
• Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold
• Lenovo’s ThinkBook Plus with E-ink screen
• Acer ConceptD 7 Ezel Pro

Computers

• Intel's 10th-Generation 'Comet Lake' CPUs
• AMD takes no prisoners
• Origin’s Big O combines PC & consoles
• MSI’s MEG Aegis Ti5
• Razer Tomahawk

TVs & Monitors

• Samsung's bezel-less 8K TV
• Samsung Sero rotating TV
• Sony Z8H 8K HDR Sony A8H 4K OLED TVs
• LG OLED ZX 88-inch 8K TV
• Asus' 360Hz Monitor
• Samsung Odyssey G9 Gaming Monitor

Headphones & speakers

• JBL's AirPods alternative
• Jabra Elite Active 75t wireless earbuds
• Harman Kardon Citation Oasis
• Vizio’s soundbar with rotating speakers
• Amazon Fire TV soundbars

Smart home devices

• Samsung Ballie
• Arlo's wireless Floodlight Camera
• Charmin’s new toilet paper robot and fart smell sensor
• Wemo Wifi Smart Plug & Stage
• Y-Brush toothbrush
  

Cars & Vehicles

• Mercedes-Benz Vision AVTR
• Sony Vision-S concept car
• Fiser's electric SUV with solar roof
• Mustang Mach-E SUV
• BMW i Interaction Ease concept
• Segway S-Pod

Dope links

• Sign in with Apple - Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3
• Swift 5.2 Development Snapshot
• Build your own Netlify-like deployment for React app using multi-container Kubernetes pod
• Canned Emails - a minimal site with prewritten emails
• Disk Sleeves
• Twenty Years Ago, Steve Jobs Showed Off the Aqua Interface for the First Time
• I created an ultra-detailed color image of the moon by combining around 100k photos
• How The Irishman’s Groundbreaking VFX Took Anti-Aging To the Next Level
  
  

This was definitely Apple's week. It all started on Monday with special event. This time it was focused on various services.

Let's start with Apple News+. Apple News has been around since 2015. The idea was to gather and curate high quality news and articles in a one place. And on the paper it sounds good, but it has never convinced me to jump on board and replace my RSS reader. Actually it was quite the opposite. But this time the Plus version looks interesting. For $9.99 a month we get access to 100 magazines, which is quite a good deal. Unfortunately there are 2 main issues with this service. First of all, for the foreseeable future, it will be available only in US and Canada. The second issue is the quality, right now those magazines are just PDFs, so there is no dynamic content we used have e.g. in iBooks or in some articles in standard Apple News.

The second service was a completely surprise. Apple introduced their own Credit card based on Apple Pay technology. The card has no additional charges and quite impressive cashback options.
This credit card sounded really nice and it would be if it was purely virtual. But Apple based this card on physical Mastercard. Don't get me wrong, this card is still really good deal especially with cashback rates, but I would love to see something even safer than traditional card connected to Apple Pay.

The next presented service was the Apple Arcade. This is game subscription which will allow to play various games without worrying about ads or microtransactions. It is something similar to Xbox Gold or PlayStation Plus. Nothing impressive here, just another way to make more money on AppStore.

The last service was Apple TV+. And we all knew what to expect here. Basically this is Apple take on Netflix. For now, Apple presented couple of original shows, with quite impressive group of people behind those series. So far they have Steven Spielberg, JJ Abrams and even Oprah Winfrey. We will see whether those shows will be worth watching.
Beside original shows, Apple TV+ will also allow, at least in US, to customize the list of TV channels we watch. Normally, we have to buy them in bundle, but here we will pay only for those channels we watch. This is cool idea and might bring quite a lot of people to Apple TV.
And the last thing, Apple TV is no longer a physical device, it will also be an app for iOS and macOS.

We all thought that the special event was the end of Apple related news for this week, but on Friday Apple announced that they canceled the AirPower mat. This was a big surprise, especially after all the teasing, code samples in iOS, and even recently the marketing materials.
Well it's sad to see that Apple was not able to pull off an engineering miracle, but it is good to see that Apple admitted the failure.

That's it for this week. If you are interested, please check out those cool things.

A web based Windows XP desktop recreation!

Why can't bots check “I am not a robot” checkboxes?

Build a Progressive Web App In VueJs, from Zero to Hero! Part I

Build a Progressive Web App In VueJs, from Zero to Hero! Part II — The Service Worker

Things nobody ever taught me about CSS

GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE 2019 LINKS

Marvel's Spider-Men Technical Postmortem

Q2VKPT

Image credits: T.C. Sottek.

This week World Wide Web turned 30 years old :). I think when Tim Berners-Lee created first WWW site, he didn't know how much he would change the world. Today it is in the center of our life. It's not only a source of information or entertainment. We shop there, we trust our savings in electronic bank. We not only earn money over Internet, but sometimes we even trust it with our lives.
Without a doubt world would not be the same without the WWW. Let's only hope that personal agendas of the politicians won't destroy it.

This week Tesla completed their S3XY car lineup with the brand new model Y. This model is a compact SUV, but it doesn't look like one. It's basically a bigger version of Model 3. The new car will be available in 2020 with price starting at $39,000 for model with 230 miles range. The 300 miles range model will cost $49,000 and the Performance version will cost $60,000.
SUVs are one of the most popular cars out there. We will see whether the people are interested enough in the electric one to boost Tesla's position on the market.

Apple finally announced the WDDC 2019. This year, conference will take place in the first week of June (3rd - 7th) in San Jose. This year's conference should be the interesting one. Of course we will get our first glimpse at iOS 13 and macOS 15. But I think we, as developers, are all waiting for more details about project Marzipan, as well as long awaited Mac Pro and maybe even rumored new MacBook Pro.

Microsoft announced that Windows will be able uninstall broken updates. This is the good step forward, especially after issues with last October update, but I'm wondering how fast we will see reports about this tool making even more harm than good.

Thats all for this week. If you want more, here is the list of interesting things.

The iOS Dev Directory

Ralph Küpper - Running Small Microservices in Swift on Production Environment

A little thread on generating and rendering a procedural trajectory mesh

Creating the Blockade Runner Engine Look for Rogue One

Designing Star Wars: Star Wars Resistance

Someone is recreating Star Wars: Dark Forces... in Unreal Engine 4

Real-Time AR Self-Expression with Machine Learning

A JavaScript-Free Frontend

Learning React Hooks by building a game - react.games Preview

Direct uploads to AWS S3 from the browser (crazy performance boost)

10 Programming Terms in Normal Human Language

Image credits: Pixabay.

This week Apple became first IT company to be worth 1 trillion dollars.
This happened after the jump in Apple's stock after reports of strong Q3 earnings that surpass both Apple's projections and analysts' estimates.
Lets face it, Apple only passed psychological barrier, there is no difference between company worth 999B and 1T dollars. In both cases this is unrealistic amount of money. But it is amazing to see how company that 20 years ago was on the verge of bankruptcy now is most valuable company in the world.
Also, it looks like Apple won't be there alone, because Amazon is on the verge of passing the 1 trillion mark. Which is not a surprise, for last couple of weeks, we saw a lot of news considering both Apple and Amazon to be first company to break 1 trillion barrier.

And here is list of interesting links.

Reading and Parsing NFC tag on iOS 11

NFC Reading on iOS 11 in 4 easy steps

NFC P2P NDEF Basics

Which self-hosted solutions are you using?

Should You Use NoSQL Or SQL Db Or Both?

5 steps to speed up your image heavy website

I created the exact same app in React and Vue. Here are the differences

React Authentication with Twitter, Google, Facebook and Github