This week Nvidia unveiled the new GeForce RTX 2000 series of graphics cards at Gamescom. New series is a long-awaited successor of GTX 1000 series. Based on new Turing architecture, the RTX 2080 is a big step forward into achieving real-time ray-tracing effects in games. Beside new effects, Nvidia also promises a 6 times more performance comparing to previous generation of GPUs.
Cards were available for preorder with shipment scheduled for 20th of September. The reference pricing for the cards is following:

• RTX 2070 is $499
• RTX 2080 is $699
• RTX 2080 Ti is $999
• RTX 2070 Founders Edition is $599
• RTX 2080 Founders Edition is $799
• RTX 2080 Founders Edition Ti is $1,199

Despite the high prices, all cards are already sold out. And thanks to crypto-miners, I would not expect to see them available before premiere or with lower prices.

This is it for this week. Before you leave, please check this list of interesting things out.

The 10 Secrets to Indie Game Success (and Why They Do Not Exist)

This is Windows 95, running in an Electron app

Splash - A fast, lightweight and flexible Swift syntax highlighter for blogs, tools and fun!

The Firebase Database For SQL Developers Series

How you can style your terminal like Medium, freeCodeCamp, or any way you want

Lolcat, Colorls, Catpix, and other Ruby Gems to add color to your terminal

Image credits: Nvidia.

This week was really uneventful. The only interesting thing was the Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 event, where new Note 9 has been announced, as well as new smart speaker - Galaxy Home. Also, Samsung has rebranded the Gear watches into Galaxy Watches so now we have entire Galaxy family of devices.
Samsung has also announced the partnership with Spotify. Now Samsung users can make Spotify the default music player across its devices.

Speaking of Samsung. One of the most popular games of last couple of months - Fortnite - was launched on Android... exclusively on recent Samsung Galaxy devices.
Last week we got news that Fortnite is not going to be available through Google Play Store. This week Epic Games dropped the bomb that it will be Samsung's exclusive at launch.
The rumors say that the exclusivity will last less than a month, but it still feels wrong.

That's it. As I said this was uneventful week. Now, the only thing left is to share the list of interesting articles.

Ray Tracing - Part 1

DX12 Ray Tracing Tutorials

Building Fluid Interfaces

Vue CLI 3.0 is here!

How I Built a Google Docs Imitation

Argon - A beautiful Design System for Bootstrap 4

Image credits: Samsung.

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

Clone Wars is saved. During San Diego Comic Con, Disney and Lucasfilm announced that the Clone Wars TV series has been renewed.
In 2012, when Disney bought Lucasfilm, the show was canceled after season five. The first half of season six, that already has been done, has been released as "The Lost Missions" on Netflix; but we never got the proper ending. Lucasfilm tried to fill the gaps with books and another TV show - Star Wars Rebels, but still we have been missing the story of almost 1.5 season. In 2016 during Ahsoka’s Untold Tales Panel, series director Dave Filoni, shared what would happen, and it looks like, the new season will show this storyline.
New season will return, next year, with 12 all-new episodes on Disney's streaming platform.

One week after premiere of new MacBook Pro, people are still talking about it. That's because two reasons. First one is fixed keyboard. It looks like Apple finally solved the issue with faulty keyboards. The second reason is related with overheating Intel i9 CPU. Youtubers reveled that i9 MacBook Pro throttles on heavy load. There are plenty of videos showing and describing the problem, here is couple of them:

• MacBook Pro 15 (2018) - Beware the Core i9
• 2018 MacBook Pro i9 Thermal Throttling CONFIRMED!
• i9 Macbook Pro 2018: Hottest Laptop on the Planet!
• The New MacBook Pro Throttles?!?

For now it looks like, there is an issue only with i9 chips, and i7 version is fine. We will see what Apple will do about this particular problem.

Finally, here is the list of interesting things I stumbled upon this week:

8-bit Emulators

Learn how to work remotely

Building the Google Photos Web UI

How to build a typing indicator for your chat app in ASP.NET

How to get started with augmented reality in Swift, the easy way

Atomic Properties in Swift

Open Terminal from Xcode

Image credits: Lucasfilm.

The silly season continues. Let's start with news from Microsoft.
It looks like Microsoft postponed the premiere of the Andromeda device to unspecified feature.
Andromeda is a codename for foldable device that supposed to blur the line between phone, tablet and PC. It looks like the reason for this delay is that the Andromeda OS is not ready. It is disappointing to hear that we will not see probably revolutionary device in the near future. On the other hand it is good that they are not going to release unfinished product.

This week we also got rumors that Microsoft is going to release Surface Go later this year. Surface Go is a tablet device that suppose to compete with Apple's iPads. If Microsoft is going to do as good job as they did with Surface Books and Pros, they might have a really good chance to take a chunk of the market share.

As we are on topic of new hardware. Apple registered five new iPads and Macs in Eurasion Database. Previously, the new additions to the database preceded the premieres, which took place about a month later. It would be unusual for Apple to have an special event in August, last one we had 11 years ago, so we will probably see those devices in September or they will be released without any special keynote.
Regardless of the release date we are getting new hardware. The three of the new MacBooks are probably from the Pro series, where the remaining two might be the MacBook Airs. As for the iPads, we should see new iPad Pros with Face ID.

It looks like Gmail Developers and third party companies have been reading our emails. It is very similar case as with Facebook. If we allowed an application to have access to our email account, the developers of this app could read our emails.
One of the involved companies explained that humans have been reading emails only to improve machine learning algorithms. It is a common practice that’s gone largely unnoticed, because most of the people doesn't even realise how much information they provide to 3rd party companies, by providing access to an account.

Finally, here is the list of interesting things I stumbled upon this week.

Explore the world of passports by country

.NET Core Microservices – DShop

Introducing the Single Element Pattern

How I automated my job with Node.js

Starter template for a MEVN (MongoDB, Express, Vue, Node) Stack Application. (Part 1)

React Native: A retrospective from the mobile-engineering team at Udacity

WWDC 2018 for iOS developers: Siri Shortcuts

Using Step Builder Pattern in Swift

15 Years Ago, I Went Indie and Didn’t Know It.

Image credits: David Breyer.