Google is well and truly on a roll lately. The Chrome 85 release is jam-packed with new features including the new content visibility property which I wrote about here. Something not many might realise is that Google has experimental support in Chrome 80 for Web Bundles.
What are Web Bundles?
Essentially, it is a new file format which allows resources in a web application to be compiled into a singular file. Think images, Javascript files, CSS and other resources you might find on a webpage. They can all be packaged into a singular file and work offline.
Have you heard about Web Capabilities Project aka Project Fugu? Chances are, you probably haven’t heard about it (unless you’re reading this well into the future), but it is one of the most exciting initiatives in the web being undertaken right now. Spearheaded by Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Intel, there are some heavy hitters supporting this.
At its core, Project Fugu is an initiative to bring native application features into the web to close the gap between web applications and native applications. This means that you do not need to use a wrapper to get access to native features, further blurring the line between native and web.
Browsing my various online sites for tech news, I came across an update for Yarn, a 2.2 release for the ill-fated Yarn 2 package manager which many will attest, has been a trainwreck of biblical proportions.
I know a couple of people who have attempted to migrate from Yarn v1 to Yarn v2 and given up in the process, opting to go back to Npm. Even though Npm might not be as cool, Npm has caught up on several fronts and really, the only reason developers chose Yarn in the first place was because of the performance improvements.
Update: This projector light lasted over a year, being on every night. Eventually, it stopped charging, and we threw it out. The battery in it failed.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve seen the Facebook or Instagram ads for the Galaxycove Star Projector. The photos and videos are convincing, to the point where they lure you in. If you’re on the checkout screen or about to splurge that $80, keep reading first.
The web continues to advance forward and like a few other convenient CSS properties such as native image lazy loading, Google have once against shipped a new feature which I am hopeful will make it into other browsers shortly called content-visibility which is part of the CSS Containment Specification.
The crux of this new property is you can tell the browser to ignore rendering of certain elements that are off-screen. Traditionally, when you load a webpage, it will draw it from top to bottom (regardless of what is visible and what isn’t), this is why virtualisation techniques are popular (especially for long grids).
As much as some people wanted to believe in Slack’s tagline that email was dead, it seems in 2020 that email is anything but dead. I observe trends in tech, I’m always looking for new ideas and startups to explore.
One thing I have noticed these past few months in 2020 is newsletters are becoming big business.
Instead of launching products, people are launching niche newsletters. And honestly, I’m sold. The past month alone, I’ve subscribed to more newsletters than I have my entire internet life.
It looks like a new hardware arms race is upon us. I am not talking about consumers rushing to buy GPU’s to mine cryptocurrencies in their parent’s basement: masks are the new hot tech (for obvious reasons).
LG has announced a yet unavailable air purifying mask that you strap to your face. They are calling it the PuriCare™ Wearable Air Purifier.
Considering 2020 is anything but normal, it seems fitting that LG would release a face mask to help continue the 2020 dystopian theme we all find ourselves embedded in. This looks like something out of Dune or a movie about a highly-infectious virus turning people into zombies.
For a while now, Microsoft has demoed and spoken about their highly hyped WebAssembly framework that aims to blur the lines between front and back-end programming.
If you are a .NET developer or just like to keep your finger on the pulse when it comes to new frameworks and web tech, you have most likely heard of Blazor. If not, you can keep reading and just smile and nod so people don’t find out you’re behind the times.
Well, this is only mildly infuriating. The Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 team have released the patch notes for an update coming in seven days for the game, which many hoped would fix some of the dismal performance issues in the game.
Well, it turns out performance optimisations are taking a backseat to primarily fixing the installer…
The patch notes header, “Install Issues” has the largest number of items in it:
The install process will no longer be blocked after a partial decompression of a package The install process will no longer be blocked when a local user account includes non-ASCII characters The install process will no longer be blocked after a failed connection to servers The install process will no longer display an empty onboarding screen under certain conditions The title will download a critical missing/deleted package to access the main menu even if the save data preference is set to offline (when an internet connection is available)
With Aurelia 2, everything has been reimagined from the ground up. While the syntax and way you build applications is largely the same as Aurelia 1, there are some key differences and one of those is lifecycles.
When I say lifecycles I am talking about component lifecycles and router lifecycles. If you need a handy reference for what lifecycle you should use, you just found it.
This will not cover all lifecycle methods, just the ones that most people would want to know about such as dom attached and where you should load data from an api.