Meta Quest+ VR Subscription Service

Meta Quest 3

Meta has announced a new VR Subscription service:

For just $7.99 USD per month or $59.99 USD annually (a savings of over 37%), you’ll get access to two hand-picked VR titles every month. And when you sign up now through July 31, you’ll get your first month for $1 USD*. With a combination of VR’s biggest hits, hidden gems, and back-catalog classics, this is the most affordable way to grow your library with killer content.

It’s a pretty good value if the games are actually worth playing. July’s games are Pistol Whip and Pixel Ripped 1995. And for August, you’ll get Walkabout Mini Golf and MOTHERGUNSHIP: FORGE.

Meta Quest Update Boosts Performance

Meta Quest Pro

From the blog announcement:

We promised you a performance upgrade, and now we’re delivering. With v55, we’re updating the Quest 2 and Pro GPU and CPU. Both headsets should see an up-to 26% CPU performance increase, while you can expect an up-to 19% GPU speed increase for Quest 2 and 11% GPU speed increase for Quest Pro. As developers take advantage of these changes, look out for smoother gameplay, a more responsive UI, and richer content on both headsets. And we’re enabling Dynamic Resolution Scaling for both Quest 2 and Pro, so games and apps can take advantage of increased pixel density without dropping frames.

Make sure to update your headset to get the latest update so you can get the performance boost as soon as possible. According to folks on Reddit, most have gotten the update in the US but internationally, it’s still being rolled out.

Apple Vision Pro

Apple Vision Pro

Apple has always been at the forefront of innovation, pushing the boundaries of technology to create groundbreaking products. The latest addition to their impressive lineup is the highly anticipated Apple Vision Pro. With a perfect blend of cutting-edge hardware and advanced software, Vision Pro promises to revolutionize the world of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences.

Unparalleled Design and Immersion

One of the standout features of the Apple Vision Pro is its impeccable design. The device seamlessly integrates a singular piece of three-dimensionally formed laminated glass with an aluminum alloy frame that gently curves to wrap around your face. This sleek and ergonomic design ensures a comfortable fit, allowing users to fully immerse themselves in the AR/VR world.

Advanced Cameras, Sensors, and Spatial Audio

The array of advanced cameras and sensors on the Apple Vision Pro work in harmony to deliver a truly immersive experience. These components enable users to see the world clearly, understand their environment, and even detect hand input. Furthermore, the carefully positioned speakers deliver rich Spatial Audio, creating a realistic soundscape that blends seamlessly with real-world sounds.

Unparalleled Display and Clarity

Featuring a pair of custom micro-OLED displays, each eye is treated to more pixels than a 4K TV, ensuring stunning clarity and visual fidelity. Whether you’re exploring virtual landscapes, watching movies, or playing games, the Vision Pro’s high-resolution display brings every detail to life, transporting you to a whole new level of realism.

Personalization and Comfort

Apple understands the importance of a personalized and comfortable user experience. The Vision Pro’s Head Band provides cushioning, breathability, and stretch for extended periods of wear. Additionally, the Fit Dial allows users to precisely adjust the device to their head, ensuring a perfect fit for optimal comfort.

Intuitive Interaction and Workspaces

With Vision Pro, Apple introduces an innovative approach to interaction and workspaces. The device offers an infinite canvas for users to arrange apps anywhere and scale them to their desired size, seamlessly blending the digital world with the real world. Whether browsing the web, taking notes, or chatting with friends, users can effortlessly multitask while staying present in their surroundings.

Transforming Any Room into a Personal Theater

Vision Pro takes entertainment to new heights by transforming any room into a personal theater. Thanks to its Spatial Audio capabilities and expansive field of view, users can enjoy movies, shows, and games at the perfect size, feeling fully immersed in the action. With more pixels per eye than a 4K TV, the Vision Pro ensures a breathtaking visual experience, whether you’re on a long flight or simply relaxing at home.

Capturing and Reliving Memories

As Apple’s first 3D camera, the Vision Pro lets users capture magical spatial photos and videos in 3D. With immersive Spatial Audio, reliving those cherished moments becomes an entirely new experience. Even your existing library of photos and videos takes on a new life when viewed on the Vision Pro’s remarkable scale. Panoramas wrap around you, transporting you back to the exact moment they were captured.

Collaboration and Connectivity

Vision Pro makes collaboration and connectivity seamless. Within FaceTime, video tiles are life-size, and as more people join the call, the experience expands within your room. You can use apps within FaceTime to collaborate with colleagues on the same documents simultaneously, enhancing productivity and facilitating remote teamwork.

Privacy and Security

As with all Apple products, privacy and security are of utmost importance. Vision Pro builds upon the foundation of Apple’s existing privacy and security features, incorporating technologies like Optic ID. This secure authentication system uses the uniqueness of your iris, ensuring that your personal data remains protected.

Conclusion

Apple Vision Pro represents a significant leap forward in the world of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences. With its sleek design, advanced cameras and sensors, spatial audio capabilities, and high-resolution displays, the Vision Pro offers users a truly immersive and transformative AR/VR experience. Whether you’re exploring virtual worlds, enjoying multimedia content, capturing memories, or collaborating with others, Vision Pro sets a new standard for personalization, comfort, and interaction. As with all Apple products, privacy and security are paramount, ensuring that users can enjoy these innovative experiences with peace of mind. With the Apple Vision Pro, Apple continues to push the boundaries of technology, unlocking new possibilities and reshaping the way we perceive and interact with the digital world.

Unlock your Stadia controller

Stadia controller

Back when Google announced that Stadia was coming to an end, one of the big questions everyone had was whether the controllers would just end up filling up a landfill somewhere. Luckily, Google has shared that there’s a way to unlock the controllers so they’ll work as standard bluetooth controllers. The process is pretty straightforward and just needs a computer with Chrome and a USB cable. And voila, you can now use your controller with any bluetooth device you want. Definitely better than a landfill full of Stadia controllers.

Testing the waters with Open Source

I have had a personal to-do for years to get more involved in open source projects. I literally have a doc with links to projects, tools to find good projects and bugs and even articles on do’s and dont’s when getting involved in a new project. But after years of trying, I have made zero contributions. So when GitHub announced they were going to help make it easier to find issues and projects to contribute to, I decided it’s time to complete this long-lasting to-do. And what better way to keep me accountable than to document my journey and share my experience with everyone. And to start, I want to share a few resources that I found extremely helpful:

First Timers Only

One of the top results when you search for contributing to open source. A great walk-through and some really good practical examples of how to find projects/issues to contribute to.

Good First Issue

A tool that helps you find (surprisingly) good first issues. Repo owners can tag issues with ‘good first issue’ which will be broadcast on Twitter via the @goodfirstissue handle.

And all of this assumes you’re already familiar with GitHub and git and how to create branches, PRs and merge things. On the other hand, if you don’t, there’s a really good walk-through available on GitHub called first-contributions. It’s very detailed and has lots of screenshots and has been localized in over 50 languages.

Okay, this is just the start, so tag along and hopefully you’ll learn something and be inspired to contribute as well.

Vue.js and VuePress – Like React if React was built right now

Vue.js

So I’ve heard about Vue.js for quite some time, but never got a chance to try it out. That has all changed and I can say I’m a big fan of Vue.js now. Simply put, Vue.js is a well-designed component framework that makes creating interactive applications really intuitive. And as a fan of React, I can also say that the setup and ease of getting started with Vue.js is a breath of fresh air compared to the complex eco-system of React these days. A lot of the syntax and conventions used by Vue.js are similar to React and took very little effort to transition from one to the other. For example, single-file components are different in Vue.js but basically the same concept as a React component, life-cycle methods are named differently but work the same way, both have props but with different syntax on how to specify them and the list goes on. I’m impressed by the ease of getting started with Vue.js and I’ve asked around and a number of teams I know are starting to work with Vue.js so its adoption is definitely growing. Of course, there’s the standard complaints of having to learn yet another framework and considering how popular React is, why should anyone adopt a new framework with fewer experienced developers. My response is that technology is always changing and sometimes there are new technologies that are great and that will replace older technologies and sometimes there are new technologies that are great that won’t replace older technologies. And no matter what, I got to learn something new and it might become the next big things but regardless, I got a new perspective on how to build applications and that makes me more knowledgable that I was previously.

I didn’t talk a lot about VuePress, so I’ll probably save that for another blog post. I will say that I really like the idea of VuePress for building static websites but still having the flexibility of building Vue components and being able to use them throughout the site (I’ll always be a fan or DRY coding). And as with every new technology I stumble upon, I started a new site with it. If you’re interested, check out www.dimelomejor.com which is completely built with Vue.js and VuePress. It’s also completely in Spanish, so this was a great opportunity for me to improve my Spanish as well. So stay tuned for my next blog post and I’ll talk more about my experience with VuePress.

CoffeeScript 2.0 Released

CoffeeScript

CoffeeScript just made v2.0 available and there’s a lot included in this release that has been in development since the beginning of 2017. I think the best way to sum of the changes is the following from the announcement:

This new release of the CoffeeScript language and compiler aims to bring CoffeeScript into the modern JavaScript era, closing gaps in compatibility with JavaScript while preserving the clean syntax that is CoffeeScript’s hallmark.

I think support for the following is a nice addition, especially since most devs have been using them for a while now in vanilla JS:

  • Modules: import/export
  • Classes: class Animal
  • Async functions: await someFunction()
  • Bound/arrow functions: =>
  • Function default parameters: (options = {}) ->
  • Function splat/rest parameters: (items...) ->
  • Destructuring, for both arrays and objects: [first, second] = items{length} = items
  • Object rest/spread properties: {options..., force: yes}{force, otherOptions...} = options
  • Interpolated strings/template literals (JS backticked strings): "Hello, #{user}!"
  • Tagged template literals: html"<strong>coffee</strong>"
  • JavaScript’s for…of is now available as CoffeeScript’s for…from (we already had a for…of): for n from generatorFunction()

Release notes can be found here and the official release on GitHub can be found here.

Startup with Google

Google

Google has a new resource for anyone wanting to start a startup and it’s called Startup with Google. It targets founders and ranges from technical topics to best practices and even helps connect founders with accelerators and local events. Most of the resources focus on promoting Google services such as Android, Google Play, Google Analytics, Google Cloud, G Suite, AdWords, TensorFlow, etc. This is truly a pitch for startups to jump on the Google train and leverage as many Google services as possible. For some startups, this will make sense, but everyone should evaluate their needs before deciding to dive head first.

I like what Google is trying to do here. While it is self-promotion, it acts as a guide for startups. It would be nice to see this evolve and potentially include a logged-in experience for startups to register and be connected with organizations or other professionals. Right now, it’s basically a pretty collection of links. But, as Google states:

You’re out in front, we’ve got your back

Automattic and React Break Up: WordPress.com Remains Only Child

Automattic

Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post explaining Automattic’s decision to halt development on their Gutenberg project that was meant to integrate React into WordPress. The main issue at hand is Facebook’s patent clause that is included with React and has been added to the Apache Software Foundation’s (ASF) list of disallowed licenses. From the ASF:

The Facebook BSD+Patents license includes a specification of a PATENTS file that passes along risk to downstream consumers of our software imbalanced in favor of the licensor, not the licensee, thereby violating our Apache legal policy of being a universal donor. The terms of Facebook BSD+Patents license are not a subset of those found in the ALv2, and they cannot be sublicensed as ALv2.

This is a shame for multiple reasons and I’m not completely faulting Facebook but this does ruin the spirit of open source when the decision to avoid a certain open source library isn’t driven by the quality/support of a library and is driven by legalese and potential lawsuits in the future. Ultimately, this doesn’t prevent me from continuing to use React (I’ll be amazed if anything I build gets me sued/allows me to sue someone) but I’m sure some organizations will now have to weigh the risks. I feel like everyone has a similar goal, so I’m hopeful that after some time, lots of meetings with lawyers, everyone will agree to something that matches the spirit of open source.

Yarn 1.0 Released

Yarn

The Facebook team has released Yarn 1.0 which is pretty impressive considering it was initially launched 11 months ago. The stats are pretty impressive with 175K projects on GitHub using Yarn. There’s also some new features with Yarn 1.0 such as Workspaces, auto-merging of lockfiles, selective version resolutions and a bunch of other fixes and improvements. Also happy to see in the “What’s next?” section a focus on improving the package release process, package security and committing to following semver.