Well, it has barely been a day with Joe Rogan starting his new $100 million dollars multi-year deal with Spotify and already the move is already generating controversy. Eagle-eyed fans have noticed that there are numerous existing Joe Rogan podcast episodes missing from Spotify, perhaps most notably are the infamous and highly entertaining Alex Jones episodes. A Reddit thread has compiled a list of missing names and there are some recurring guests that come up.
As some might be aware, there is currently a news war taking place in Australia. The Australian Government alongside the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) have drafted legislation which will compel companies like Google and social media platforms such as Facebook to pay for news on their respective apps and sites. Google recently weighed in on the issue with an open letter to Australians and now, Facebook has done the same issuing a straight-to-the-point press release about the legislation.
If you’ve been following any tech news for the last few weeks, you have probably heard about the TikTok situation unfolding in the US where Donald Trump via executive order is forcing a sale of TikTok in the US or banning it. To say that 2020 has been a wild and unprecedented year is an understatement. TikTok has been a source of entertainment for those staying at home as the COVID-19 pandemic closes down schools, states, countries and limits movement.
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.