Apple's Best of 2019 awards

For the first time, Apple has held a special event to recognize the best apps and developers. Here are the winners:

• ‌Apple Arcade‌ Game of the Year - Sayonara Wild Hearts
• ‌iPhone‌ App of the Year - Spectre Camera
• ‌iPhone‌ Game of the Year - Sky: Children of the Light
• ‌iPad‌ App of the Year - Flow
• ‌iPad‌ Game of the Year - Hyper Light Drifter
• Mac App of the Year - Affinity Publisher
• Mac Game of the Year - GRIS
• ‌Apple TV‌ App of the Year - The Explorers
• ‌Apple TV‌ Game of the Year - Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap

Apple has also announced Apple Music‌ Awards with a dope trophy.

Best Android Apps of 2019

Google has also announced the most popular applications from Play Store. Unfortunately, there are only 2 categories:

• Best Game - Mu Origin 2
• Best App - Ablo

MacBook Pro and iPad Pro with mini LED display

According to MIng-Chi Kuo, next year, Apple is going to release an iPad Pro and new 16' MacBook Pro with displays based on mini LED technology.

The new technology has couple of advantages:

• more dense (thousands of light sources instead of hundreds),
• higher brightness and  contrast ratio,
• deeper blacks,
• power-efficient,
• Less prone to burn-in and won't degrade over time like OLED.

So basically the mini LED is improved equivalent of OLED. This is important because at the moment, Samsung has monopoly on production of OLED  screens. Leaning toward mini LED might mean that Apple is trying to become independent of Samsung.

16-inch MacBook Pro Popping Sound Issue

Some users of the newest 16-inch MacBook Pro started reporting issue with popping sound, when playback is stoped. Apple has acknowledge the problem and it working on fix that should be available in the future software update.

This is yet another issue with speakers in MacBook Pro lineup. In 2018, after Apple introduced refreshed model, users started reporting crackling speakers. That issue has also been solved with software update.

Future of iPhones

This week we had plenty of rumors regarding iPhones. Here is the tl;dr:

In 2020, Apple is going to release following phones:

• 4.7-inch iPhone 9: LCD display, single-lens rear camera,
• 5.4-inch iPhone 12: OLED display, dual-lens rear camera, with 5G support
• 6.1-inch iPhone 12: OLED display, dual-lens rear camera, with 5G support
• 6.1-inch iPhone 12 Pro: OLED display, triple-lens rear camera, 5G support
• 6.7-inch iPhone 12 Pro Max: OLED display, triple-lens rear camera, 5G support.

In 2021, Apple will introduce:

• 5.5 or 6.1-inch iPhone SE/9 Plus: full screen design with TouchID,
• highest model without Lightning port, it will be completely wireless device.

It is worth noting that, iPhone SE 2 will be called iPhone 9.

In 2020, the iPhone Pro will get bigger screen, and I don't like that. The current 5.9-inch model is perfect for me, where 6.1-inch is a little bit too big 😞.

Regarding completely wireless iPhone, I'm not sure we are ready for this. This is big commitment, people will need wireless headphones, chargers and the rest of accessories. Although, I'm using wireless headphones for couple of years now, as a developer, I'm not ready to give up wired charging and debugging. I hope this will be just one "experimental" model, to see how people would react, and to allow the rest of manufacturers to create wireless accessories.

Interesting links

• Every Website in 2019
• Vue.js — Manage your Modal window(s) effortlessly using EventBus
• Portal – a new feature in Vue 3
• Building a Tech Crunch style Progress Scroll with Vue, SVG and TypeScript
• Beginner JavaScript
• Procedurally Generated SVG Landscapes
• Must-have SwiftUI extensions
• Localization in SwiftUI
• Performance Battle: AnyView vs Group
• Training Text Classifier to detect SPAM using CreateML
  

Image credits: Apple

This year, I celebrate May the 4th by recreating the Binary Sunset scene, from Episode IV, using html, css and svg. You can check it out at Tatooine.live.

So far site works properly only on Chrome. On other browsers there are some performance issues and glitches. For those who uses browsers other than Chrome I prepared YouTube clip.

Enjoy and happy Star Wars day!

This week Apple announced that this year WWDC will run from June 4 to June 8 in San Jose, California. We are definitely going to get iOS 12 and new macOS 10.14. It was rumored that Apple is focusing on bug fixes instead of new features. Personally, I'm hoping for those rumors to be true.

On the other side of barricade, Google decided to change the name of Android Wear to Wear OS by Google.

In the meantime, Marvel drops new Infinity War trailer.

As usual, here is list of interesting articles.

Building a Progressive Quiz App with Vue, Vuex, and Firestore: Part 1
This article explains how to create simple quiz app using Vue.js and Google's Firestore database.

An in-depth introduction to Docker on AWS
Every developer heard about Docker. But it doesn't mean they know how it works. This article explains it all - what the Docker is, how it works and how to use it with AWS.

How we launched our first MVP in one month
We live in times when startups releases their products all time. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail miserably. From this article you will learn what went wrong in failed project, and what went right so author could finally launch successful product.

Things you need to know about working with SVG in VS Code
VS Code become one of the most popular code editors. If don't using it, you should at least check it out.
If you are using it and you work with SVG this article is for you.

Image credits: Apple.