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.
The latest trend in web design and development is no-code. Well, it’s not exactly latest, the trend has been around for a while now. You can go back to the early 2000’s and point out numerous software apps and web offerings that would fall under the no-code umbrella. However, it’s hard to argue that 2020 besides being dominated by a highly contagious respiratory virus pandemic, no-code has been thrown around a lot. If you visit sites like producthunt, you would know what I am talking about.
I see a lot of questionable blog posts and articles out there about Javascript. And, I should know, I have written some of them myself in the ten years I’ve been blogging on this site. However, over the last few years since the rise of Medium and Dev.to, I have noticed a few articles (I won’t link or name any) which go along the lines of this: Stop Using For Loops and Use map, filter and reduce instead
I have a lot of ideas, in notebooks, in the form of half-completed side projects on GitHub and my computer. Shipping has always been a problem for me and I rarely share ideas or insights into anything, but today that is all changing. I am launching The Ideas Digest, a newsletter which will send an occasional newsletter about a particular idea or topic. It’ll provide research and insights for how someone might build a product or offering around the idea or problem.