Interrupt #1 - WebAssembly, Starlink, Failed takeover, Flutter for Windows, Hibiki

Feb 10, 2022

Interrupt is a weekly newsletter compiled from the most interesting things I have read this week. Sometimes along with my original writing.

Subscribe if you want a weekly digest of tech news with some commentary.

This week in Interrupt

Prime Video is using WebAssembly. Samsung Unpacked! Nvidia's Arm acquisition. Starlink. Hibiki. Flutter for Windows. Laravel 9.

News and Happenings

Prime Video app is using WebAssembly

Prime Video is using WebAssembly and Rust for its player on 8,000 supported devices which is hella interesting. It's not everyday when you find Rust being used in a very popular website.

But the article is pretty vague on what it is exactly being used for. It just says we are using it at certain places. Because it's faster and performant. Sucks for us readers. But more WebAssembly and Rust will be always great.

Read the entire article at amazon.science

Nvidia has abandoned its $40 billion takeover of Arm

Due to regulatory blockages, Nvidia has scrapped its acquisition of SoftBank's Arm. Back in 2020, Nvidia has announced this semiconductor and software design company's takeover with much fanfare and industry skepticism. Arm is basically a IP company which licenses its RISC-based Arm SoC designs to Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia itself. There were growing apprehensions that Nvidia will try to stop using other companies from using Arm's designs.

Looks like regulators were not impressed in the end.

Read the entire article at cnbc.com

Unpacked: Samsung launched Galaxy S22, S22 Plus and S22 Ultra along with Tab S8 tablets

Another year, another Galaxy. S22 Ultra is basically the new Note. Other variants are yearly iterative upgrades with new camera and colors.

Big news: Samsung now promises 4 generations of Android updates and 5 years of security updates.

Read the entire spec and news at gsmarena

Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

SpaceX has said that 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched to low Earth orbit on Feb 3 are now doomed by a geomagnetic storm. As per NOAA, these storms are major disturbance of Earth's magnetosphere that occurs when there is a very efficient exchange of energy from the solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth.

the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe-mode to begin orbit raising maneuvers … up to 40 of the satellites will reenter or already have reentered the Earth’s atmosphere.

Read the entire article at EarthSky

Flutter for Windows

First production release of Flutter for Windows is out now. Flutter is an open-source SDK by Google to develop cross-platform applications using a single Dart codebase.

Flutter has been quickly gaining mind share to build fast and aesthetically pleasing apps. It's quickly becoming a popular alternative to ReactNative and Xamarin. Nearly half a million apps currently use Flutter on mobile platforms and now Windows app developers can also leverage this modern framework and its tooling.

Read the official announcement at Flutter team's Medium

Adobe caught tricking users into year subscriptions

Read the Twitter thread by @darkpatterns. And Adobe is not the only company doing this.

Found and Updated

Hibiki, a front-end framework

Hibiki HTML is a new front-end framework that can be completely controlled by back-end code. You don't need webpack, babelwrite any JS.

Okay, some JS. It's a single JS file with built-in data model, Vue-like rendering and more.

The license is just open-sourc-ish though, so be careful.

Laravel 9 is out

PHP might have bad reputation in developer community but it is still wildly popular and used by millions of websites. Web frameworks like Laravel is a big reason for that. Version 9 is out with

controller route groups, a refreshed default Ignition error page, Laravel Scout database engine, Symfony mailer integration, Flysystem 3.x, Improved Eloquent accessors/mutators, and many more features.

Medusa, open-source alternative to Shopify

From its ProductHunt's page, Medusa is an open source headless commerce platform with building blocks to customize your setup in any way you want. Easy to set up with plug-n-play integrations to payments, CMSs, shipping, analytics etc.

Out of the box, you get a beautiful and user-friendly admin system and a commerce engine with extremely powerful default implementations for dealing with products, orders, payments, customers, promotions, taxes, search, and much more, and the most amazing thing is that when you need to you can take full control over any part of Medusa and make it your own.