This past week mostly looked to me as a lot more talk about the iPhone 7 and iOS 10 reviews, but there were a couple of unrelated software releases that interest me.
Apple OS Releases
Let’s get the boring ones out of the way first. While not boring itself, I’ve discussed iOS 10 before and after using it for some days my initial ideas haven’t changed. It’s a decent OS update, and all the messages stuff is really fun and seems to work quite well. The best and most comprehensive review is probably the one on Macstories, written by Frederick Vittici. As someone who almost exclusively uses iOS he’s in a good position to show both the improvements and shortcomings and he didn’t disappoint. Just be warned, it’s a very big review.
Similar things are the case for the new versions of watchOS and tvOS. As I don’t have either I can’t say much about them, so I’ll just point straight at the Macstories reviews again. Don’t worry, these are a lot shorter.
Vim 8.0
In less expected news, the first new major version of Vim in 10 years has just been released. For a very long time Vim was my editor of choice, although in recent years I’ve strayed from that path and have been using the newcomers Sublime Text and Atom as my main editors while Vim is relegated to quick things when I’m working on the command line or on a server.
A complete list of the updates is available on GitHub, but in general it seems to be a pretty good release. There’s a bunch of new features for power users1 that seem useful, but I think the one that will be useful to most people is the package manager for plugins. Over the years a number of package managers for Vim have actually been created, but it’s great that it’s now included in the main application2. If you haven’t done so yet3, you can download this new version from the site.
GitHub updates
GitHub had some nice changes as well. While the updating commenting and review system might look familiar to people familiar with Bitbucket, at first glance it looks well implemented and something that is very useful. Similarly, the project management tools that are now available have some good potential. While I suspect that a lot of bigger projects will already use some kind of project management tool, this will still be useful for the rest. It seems to be a pretty standard KANBAN setup that you can drag your tickets around in.
There are more changes, but unless you manage an enterprise GitHub account these two are probably the most interesting to you. For those enterprise accounts however it is now possible to enforce two factor authentication, a great improvement from a security perspective.
Angular JS 2
The last thing I’ll mention in this short note is the release of Angular 2. Now, I haven’t actually used Angular. My forays into JS frameworks has been mostly limited to Ember, but as these two and React are probably the best-known frameworks around it’s worth a mention4.
The change from 1 to 2 is a breaking change, as they’ve taken the opportunity to rewrite a lot based on what was learned in the 6 years between these two releases. This means a lot cleaner syntax and will likely make it easier to pick up for new users, but might also cause some issues when you transition. As usual, this will probably be the case when you have both old and new projects. There is a quick reference guide of the common syntax changes however, so if you are an existing Angular user looking at version 2 that might be a good place to start.