Samsung Unpack

This week Samsung held its Unpacked event and presented new phones:

Samsung Galaxy S20 & S20+

The successors to S10 model have following specification:

• 6.2-inch 120Hz QHD+ OLED display in S20,
• 6.7-inch 120Hz QHD+ OLED display in S20+,
• Snapdragon 865 CPU,
• 12GB of RAM,
• 128GB of storage + microSD in S20,
• 128 or 512 GB of storage + microSD in S20+,
• 10MP Selfie camera,
• Triple (12+64+12MP) rear camera system,
• 5G compatible,
• 4000mAh battery in S20 & 4500mAh in S20+.

Samsung Galaxy S20 starts at $999,  and S20+ starts at $1199. Both will be available on March 6th.

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra

Samsung also revealed the premium model in S20 lineup.

• 6.9-inch 120Hz QHD+ OLED display,
• Snapdragon 865 CPU,
• 12GB or 16GB of RAM,
• 128GB or 512GB of storage + microSD in S20+,
• 40MP Selfie camera
• Triple (108+48+12MP) rear camera system with additional depth camera,
• 5G compatible,
• 5000mAh battery.

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra starts at $1399, and will be available on March 6th.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip

Samsung presented another foldable phone -  Galaxy Z Flip,  but it's not a successor to Galaxy Fold. Here is the spec:

• 6.7-inch FHD+ AMOLED main display,
• 1.1-inch Super AMOLED cover Display,
• Snapdragon 855+ CPU,
• 8GB of RAM,
• 256GB of storage,
• 10MP Selfie camera,
• Dual 12MP rear camera system,
• 3300mAh battery.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip costs $1,380 and launched on February 14th.

Xiaomi Mi 10

Despite of the Coronavirus outbreak in China, Xaomi managed to launch, at online-only event, the new flagship phones - Xiaomi Mi 10 & Mi 10Pro. Here is the spec of presented devices:

• 6.67-inch 90Hz AMOLED display,
• Snapdragon 865 CPU,
• 8 or 12GB of RAM,
• 128GB or 256GB of storage in Mi 10,
• 256GB or 512 of storage in Mi 10 Pro,
• 20MP Selfie camera
• Quad (108+12+8+20MP) rear camera system in Mi 10,
• Quad (108+12+2+2MP) rear camera system in Mi 10 Pro,
• 5G compatible,
• 4780mAh battery in Mi 10 & 4500mAh in Mi 10 Pro.

Xiaomi Mi 10 starts at ~$575 and will be available in China from February 14. Xiaomi Mi 10Pro  starts at ~$715 and will be available in China from February 18.

$450 production cost of PlayStation 5

According to Bloomberg manufacturing costs of the PlayStation 5 are around $450 per unit. The biggest reason for higher cost is limited supply and high prices of DRAM and NAND flash memories.

Dope links

• Swift Playgrounds for macOS
• Swift Package framework creation in Xcode
• How to Send Push Notifications to the iOS Simulator
• Full Stack Open 2019 - Deep Dive Into Modern Web Development
• GraphQL is Not "Better" Than REST
• What to Choose Between Gridsome and NuxtJS
• The guide to write universal, SSR-ready Vue components
• A Vue powered design tool that... exports Vue components
• Create a Reading Scroll Progress Bar for Your Blog in JavaScript and CSS
• How I recreated a Polaroid camera with CSS gradients only
• Spider-Man Developers Want More People to Know How Games Are Written
• Third Row Tesla Podcast – Elon Musk's Story - Director's Cut

Image credits: Samsung

One connector to rule them all

EU lawmakers voted overwhelmingly (540-40) in favor for rules that would establish a common charger standard for mobile devices. It has not been decided which connector is the chosen one, but proposed charging ports include Micro-USB, USB-C and the Lightning connector. Looking at the already wide adoption of the USB-C, it's rather safe to say that it will be chosen. Fortunately, we won't have to wait long for the decision, the European Commission should adopt new rules by July.

Apple wants to make SMS one-time codes safer

Apple's WebKit team published a proposal to change the format of SMS one-time passcodes. The idea is to make the two-factor authentication process more secure. The proposal describes two ideas to achieve that:

1. SMS one-time passcodes would be associated with a URL. It would be achieved by simply adding the website's URL to the SMS itself,
2. Standardized format of two-factor authentication SMS code would allow applications to detect passcodes; automatically extract them, and complete the login process without further user interaction.

Here is an example of such SMS message:

011970 is your Brain Archives authentication code.
@brainarchives․com #011970

So far Apple and Google have backed the proposal.

iOS 14 to support the same iPhones as iOS 13

According to French website iPhonesoft, iOS 14 will be compatible with all iPhones supported by iOS 13,  including:

• iPhone 11,  11 Pro & 11 Pro Max,
• iPhone XS & XS Max,
• iPhone XR,
• iPhone X,
• iPhone 8 & 8 Plus,
• iPhone 7 & 7 Plus,
• iPhone 6S & 6S Plus,
• iPhone SE,
• iPod touch (7th generation).

As for the iPads, iPhonesoft informs that iOS14 will drop support for the iPad mini 4, and will support following devices:

• 12.9-inch iPad Pro,
• 11-inch iPad Pro,
• 10.5-inch iPad Pro,
• 9.7-inch iPad Pro,
• iPad 7th, 6th & 5th   generation,
• iPad mini (5th generation),
• iPad Air (3rd generation).

iPad turned 10

This week is the 10th anniversary of the original iPad announcement. iPad supposed to become the "post PC" device that would replace personal computers. 10 years later, we know it hasn't done that yet, but current generation of iPads and iPadOS is closer than ever. Although, tablets hasn't become as popular as smartphones, iPad helped Apple take over this market.

Google's new business communicator

According to report from The Information Google is working on a new communicator for workplaces, that will combine the part of GSuite functionality, like Gmail Google Drive & Hangouts.

Dope links

• Atomic property wrapper in Swift
• Translucent “Now Playing” Bar
• iOS App Security: Best Practices
• Post Mortem: App Store Outage on January 24th, 2020
• React Native is the Future of Mobile at Shopify
• Intro to PWAs and Service Workers
• Introducing Yarn 2 ! 🧶🌟
• TypeOfNaN JavaScript Quizzes
• A long list of (advanced) JavaScript questions, and their explanations ✨
• How Smashing Magazine Manages Content: Migration From WordPress To JAMstack
• Using NSwag to Generate a Vue Client for an ASP.NET Core 3.1 API
• Intrinsic Sizing In CSS
• Memory Management Reference
• Understanding The GIT Workflow
• Words Are Hard - An Essay on Communicating With Non-Programmers
• Postwoman • API request builder
• Are you unique?

Image credits: Lucian Alexe

This week Disney announced new TV series - Star Wars Resistance. It will be animated story of young pilot - Kazuda Xiono - recruited by the Resistance. For now we don't know much about the story, beside the fact that we'll meet new trilogy characters like Poe Dameron and Captain Phasma.
The series is created by Lucasfilm Animation veterans, including Dave Filoni.
Show will have its premiere this fall.

After many years Google decided to redesign Gmail. After Google Calendar, the mail client also got the Material design.
I must admit that after years of using old Gmail, now it feels strange, but I'm sure this is something that I'll get use to.

Unboxings of Nintendo Lobo started showing up on YouTube. I must admit, after watching first announcements I was skeptical. Now, after seeing how this works behind the scenes I am really impressed. I had no idea how much ingenuity and engineering was put to create Labo experiments.

And last but not least, here is the list of interesting articles.

Here are three common ways to create your Lambda functions with AWS
Serverless becomes more and more popular. Here you will learn how to create serverless functions using AWS.

Creating a Website with Nuxt.js and WordPress REST API
From this article you will learn how to create custom CMS using Vue.js, Nuxt.js and Wordpress as a backend.

I built a screenshot API and some guy was mining cryptocurrencies with it
Good reminder that we should always protect our APIs because they can be exploited to do unusual things.

Higher Order Function and its uses in Swift 4
Here you will find overview of functional programming in Swift.

Managing UI Colours with iOS 11 Asset Catalogs
Arnold Sakhnov explains how to manage and use UIColors in iOS projects.

JavaScript ES6 — write less, do more
Short but refreshing overview of new functionality introduced in ES6.

Vue.js & Electron: The easy way
Vue-CLI 3 is here and from this post you will learn how to use it to create Electron project.

Image credits: Disney.

After busy begining of the year the last week of Junary was calm. I would even risk to say it was boring.
Cryptocurencies are still falling, but on the bright side, Space X finally performed static fire test of Falcon Heavy. Now we are waiting for launch, which is planned for 6th of February.

Beside this nothing much happend so let go stright to list of interesting articles.

Rest confusion explained
Follow up to the very popular and controversial Rest is the new SOAP article.

I am a 9-5 developer and so can you
We programmers spend to much time on coding. We love it, but we also need to know when to stop. In this article Matthew Jones explains how to reconcile private and professional life.

EA scared of youtubers
Recent events showed that gamers have enough of EA's bad practices. It looks like that EA is now scared of the opinions of prominent Youtubers.

How one person caused the price of cryptocurrencies to fall
It looks like, once again, lack of communication caused a catastrophe.

PWAs are coming to iOS 11.3: Cupertino, we have a problem
Apple added Service Workers to iOS 11.3. Those allow programmers to create Progressive Web Apps.

Why I left Google to join Grab
This article might seems to be another rant about "evil" Google, but actually it shows interesting point of view, where Google stopped to be innovative.

HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons
If you ever wonder how HTTPS works, here is human friendly explanation.

Create Guten Block Toolkit
This is zero-configuration dev-toolkit for developing WordPress Gutenberg blocks. Although it is a tool dedicated to WordPress, it has some interesting ideas that have a great chance of being adopted in other projects.

Codable enums in Swift
This article explains how to encode and decode enums with associated types.

Whopper Neutrality
This is brilliant. Burger King shows to ordinary people what is Net Neutrality.

Magnetic USB-C cable
If you're missing magsafe in new MacBooks, this is something that might interest you.

Image credits: SpaceX.