Apple’s WWDC 2023: Vision Pro & iOS 17
Each year at WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the company showcases what’s next for its biggest platforms — iOS, macOS, and more — and what developers can do to make apps and services for them. Let’s take a look at two key announcements made at the keynote address on Monday, 5 June 2023. Apple Vision Pro, a…
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How to Reduce Mobile App Size
Mobile phones have evolved a lot over the last few years. However storage is still a big concern. In addition to all the apps we have installed, we still would love to have a lot more storage for our photos and music. This makes the mobile app developer’s job a little more challenging as they…
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Javascript: Measuring Time to Make Informed Decisions
As an engineer, especially when working on enterprise-grade applications, our coding is influenced by many factors. It is no longer about if your function worked or your ability to achieve the desired result. It is rather about writing performant code, thinking about time complexity vs space complexity, scaling, and ensuring that your application is as fast…
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Shoelace: A Framework-Agnostic Web Component Library
Web components were introduced in 2011, but if you ask most frontend developers, they aren’t their first choice for composing UI layouts. This is partly due to an increase in JavaScript frameworks, component-driven development enthusiasts, and other esoteric factors over the years. Two key drawbacks of web components are: Now, in comes Shoelace, a UI library…
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Do you know you can build Flutter apps in Python? 😮
I am guessing most of you have heard about Flutter. If not, here you go in just one sentence. Flutter is an open-source framework by Googlefor building beautiful, natively compiled applicationsfrom a single codebasefor iOS, Android, Web, MacOS, Windows and Linux. Dart is the programming language used to code Flutter apps and at the start most developers find it a little…
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iOS & Android Quick Actions
Quick actions are a great way to provide your users fast access to your app’s common functionality within the home screen. iOS 13 introduced the concept of quick actions, where a user can touch and hold an app icon to display a set of shortcuts or actions to perform right from the home screen. Many…
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What is Mobile Accessibility?
With over 6.3 billion global smartphone users, it’s critical mobile apps are inclusive of everyone, including those with vision impairment, hearing limitations, or other physical or cognitive conditions. What do we mean by an accessible app? An accessible app means that most people can use it without help from another person, regardless of ability or situation.…
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How Do Apps Like Google and Microsoft Authenticator Work?
Authenticators are applications that serve several purposes for Android and iOS devices. They’re mainly used for two types of authentication, known as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and multi-step authentication (MSA). They provide advanced security for user sites. What this means is that it’s not enough to know or have an account password. With increased hacking and…
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How does India’s 𝐔𝐏𝐈 (Unified Payments Interface) work?
UPI has gone through 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 since its inception in 2016. It builds a digital payments ecosystem with payment apps, banks, and NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India). It now takes up 60% of digital retail transactions in India. It is estimated that the digital payments market in India will grow by 3 times in 2026. So,…
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How does 𝐁𝐍𝐏𝐋 (Buy Now, Pay Later) work?
Earlier this year, we took over development of the mobile app for a retail app of a leading brand of kids clothings. And one of the features on the checkout page is the option of using Afterpay as you can see in the screenshot below. This got me wondering how do 𝐁𝐍𝐏𝐋 (Buy Now, Pay…
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How are Notifications Pushed to our Mobile Devices?
Most people have a love/hate relationship with mobile push notifications. On the one hand, they keep us updated with the information we willingly asked to be updated on. On the other hand, for people like me, that constant activity on my phone is annoying and distracting. My friends tease me, but I can’t go to…
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WWDC 2022: What’s new in iOS, WatchOS, MacOS?
Each year Apple kicks off its Worldwide Developer Conference with a few hours of back-to-back-to-back announcements, generally covering things from iOS to watchOS to new hardware. Here are some of the key announcements made at the keynote on Monday. iOS 16 The lock screen is getting an overhaul. It’ll allow for more customization, plus support for widgets —…
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Airbnb Moves from Webpack to Metro for Faster Builds
Like many companies, Airbnb has experienced growing pains with bundlers as its codebase grew. But even after its codebase quadrupled, the company was able to speed UX changes to the front end when it migrated its JavaScript code bundler from Webpack to Metro in 2018. With build performance significantly improved, UI changes appeared 80% faster, as per the Time to Interactive (TTI) metric.…
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.NET MAUI Reaches General Availability, Replacing Xamarin.Forms
Microsoft’s evolution of Xamarin.Forms, .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI), has finally reached General Availability status, providing one framework for both mobile apps and, now, desktop apps. Announced at the company’s big Build developer conference, the GA release is some six months late, as it was originally planned to debut with .NET 6 in November 2021…
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Google AR Glasses
There was a lovely surprise at the end of the Google I/O 2022 keynote last week. It was a look at its latest AR glasses. The key feature Google showed off was the ability to see languages translated right in front of your eyes, which seems to me like a very practical application for AR…
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Google I/O 2022: Everything New for Developers
Last night (India time!) we had Google I/O, which at its core is a developer focused event. Here are the some of the biggest announcements made at the keynote. Android With Android 12L last year and Android 13 this fall, Google has been focusing on enhancing the experience on “large screen” devices like tablets and foldables.…
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FIDO – The Password Killer
Did you know that the first Thursday of May is apparently “World Password Day”? I didn’t! And this year to celebrate this day Apple, Google, and Microsoft are launching a “joint effort” to kill the password. The major OS vendors want to “expand support for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and…
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The Cone Model
As managers, we are expected to provide an exceptional level of support to our teams. And this support could cover both technical and non-technical, even emotional support. This is extremely hard work and requires plenty of patience, trust and understanding on both sides. The Triangle There are many ways to build this A-grade level of…
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Popular React Lazy-Loading Libraries
With images making up 65% of all web content, page load time on websites can easily become an issue. Images can weight quite a bit. This can have a negative impact on the time visitors have to wait before they can access content on your website. they will get navigate somewhere else, unless you come up…
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Minze, a Minimalistic JS Library for Creating Web Components
There are a number of new frameworks introduced to the JavaScript ecosystem. This has led to an issue for teams that are exploring all these latest and greatest frameworks. How to do they develop and maintain components for these different framework syntaxes? Minze was invented in order to reduce this stress. With Minze, you can write…
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Shake on Invalid Input
More often than not, forms and form fields are coupled with form field validations that validate the text inside the field and show an error if the validation failed. Here is the simple code for the same. Here is what this looks like View source code here: Link
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What is Web3 – The Decentralized Internet of the Future?
Web3 is a somewhat ambiguous term, which makes it difficult to rigorously evaluate what the ambitions for web3 should be, but the general thesis seems to be that web1 was decentralized, web2 centralized everything into platforms, and that web3 will decentralize everything again. web3 should give us the richness of web2, but decentralized. The web has evolved…
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if/else in CSS
As we know, there are no conditional statements in CSS, but this may soon change with new @when and @else operator Currently, the only way to perform a conditional statement was to use media queries like this: We can use CSS preprocessors like SASS which allows us to write condition statements in it. Even if you use SASS you have to…
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Full Page Video in Background
If you want to engage first-time visitors on your website, you have about 10 to 20 seconds to do so. Life is short, and nobody wants to waste their time on a run-of-the-mill webpage. So, how can we inject some life into our page content in a way that captures visitors’ attention and keeps them scrolling?…
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Rarely Used CSS Properties
The Column-Rule Property CSS columns is a layout method which can divide an element into columns. A common usecase is to divide a paragraph text into two or more columns. The interesting bit is that we can add borders between the columns. The column-rule property name might not reflect it’s purpose, but you can imagine…
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WWDC – iOS 15: Live Text
With iOS 15, you now have the ability to read and understand text in photos if you have a phone with an A12 Bionic processor. Apple uses secure on-device intelligence to help you discover more in your photos, quickly find what you’re looking for, and relive special moments. Live Text intelligently unlocks rich and useful…
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WWDC – iOS 15: Safari
The totally redesigned Safari coming with iOS 15 has a lot of cool things that will make it much easier to use across your iPhone, iPad and Macs. Apple shared two goals that were kept in mind with the new Safari Making controls easier to reach with one handPutting content front and center The very…
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WWDC – iOS 15: Focus
Of all the interesting stuff Apple discussed, the one that made me go “WOW” was Focus. It is something that I always wanted on my phone. Ever since we’ve been working from home for over a year now, it has been very challenging for me to disconnect, to have that clear separation between your work…
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Kenrick Vaz 