I am stoked for the Playstation VR headset for the Playstation 4 console. Pricing was announced at $399 USD and the Australian price is $550. Sony did reveal that it would be priced as a new platform, so this falls directly inline with the cost of a PS4 console. Keep in mind this figure does not account for the cost of the Playstation Camera: $59 USD/$75 AUD and Playstation Move controllers: $49 USD/$46 AUD each.
This is a fun little plugin I wrote not long ago for being able to specify routes in JSON files and then load them into your Aurelia application. In my use-case recently I needed to define a bunch of routers and while I could have used child routers, at present child routers have limitations around things like triggering events and whatnot. I keep things simple by using top-level routes. As you can imagine, a simple application can grow into 10+ routes with ease, especially with an administration panel. This is why splitting routes into separate files can make your life easier, especially on a large team.
Support for Object.values(), Object.entries() and Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptors() has landed in the Google Chrome dev channel. These newly added methods are currently candidate proposals and at stage 3 for the ES2017 specification. Many of us were using Lodash for some of the aforementioned missing features from browsers like Object.values. So these are welcome additions. Keep in mind that these have not landed in the consumer release version of Google Chrome, maybe in a month or two we will see these released, perhaps even sooner. For the moment they are hidden behind a flag and only in the Canary version, enabled in options under “Experimental Javascript”. I did not realise these additions were so far along in the specification and hopefully provided there are no delays, we see them land in the finalised spec later next year.
Well here goes nothin’. I am publishing a book on LeanPub on working with Aurelia. Initially I was working with a publisher to write a book on Aurelia, but the pressures of a strict schedule with a child under and full time job meant it did not work out. However, I really want to get something out there. So I felt Leanpub would be the best fit. I can write when I find the time, I can publish new chapters as I complete them and get feedback from customers throughout the process of the book.
I have been working with Aurelia and Node for a while now and recently I took the time to properly create an Aurelia Node.js starter skeleton and put it up on Github here. While getting Node.js to work with Aurelia is not exactly difficult, this is more of a time saving convenience. I have seen other solutions, but they feel a little hacky and structurally confusing. I adopted a Meteor approach in that all client logic is handled in the client folder and Node.js server logic is in the server folder.
When inside of an Aurelia ViewModel there are situations where you might want to know what the current route is within a ViewModel. One such scenario I encountered recently where I had one View and ViewModel pair being accessed by 5 different routes. I needed to know what route was accessing my ViewModel to load different data. This is what the second parameter of the activate method for. activate(params, navigationInstruction) { console.log(navigationInstruction); } The navigationInstruction parameter gives you the information about the route currently accessing the ViewModel. This allows you to access everything about the route, including the navModel
In-case you hadn’t heard, the FBI is trying to compel Apple to assist them in cracking open an iPhone 5c used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino shooting that took placed back on December 2, 2015. While on the surface the demands to some might sound reasonable, “Please help us unlock this shooters phone, Apple, so that we can see if they had any other accomplices and try and find out what happened” – make no mistake, there is more than meets the eye here.
Update: December 12th, 2016 A lot has changed since this article was published. The bundling situation is a lot better and things have changed. While some of this article might still be applicable, please do your research and assume that parts of this article are no longer relevant. When it comes to Aurelia, one aspect that seems to trip up and confuse first timers and even seasoned developers is bundling.
In Npm version 3 we finally got what we had been asking for the last few years: a flattened module structure for Node modules. Unfortunately as a result Npm has slowed to a crawl when installing or updating Node modules, well mostly just installing. Recently it was circulating that disabling the progress bar resulted in at least a three times speed increase. I first saw it on Twitter and dismissed it initially.
At the time of writing this, the preferred approach to client side dependencies and loading is Jspm which is one part package manager and one part SystemJS loader polyfill. Although, we will be seeing other loader options in the near future such as Webpack and even a potential custom loader from the Aurelia team. But for now we have Jspm and System.js. Install the JSON loader for System.js We can use the JSON loader for System.js to load JSON files in our app in a bulletproof way. You can view the plugin here and see that it is really quite simple under the hood.