Long story short, this has been a detrimental year for Intel and a colossal win for AMD. For myself, however, the story isn't as simple as one or the other. My first AMD machine was a Turion 64 X2 back in April 2007. The machine itself was fine, it got a little toasty from time to time and it certainly couldn't play many games of its time and it eventually broke down three years after purchase. AMD had let me down.
But way back in 2005, I was always very skeptical of the performance of my beast (but only in physical size) of a laptop that was supposedly a desktop replacement when compared with the AMD powered version. The Athlon XP and Athlon 64 versions often outperformed the Pentium 4 version and although AMD CPUs were perhaps better than Intel's at that time, AMD didn't have the market.
Things got doom and gloom in 2010 onwards for AMD. AMD had definitely lost grip of the market. But as my blog followers will have noticed, I now keep banging on about AMD Ryzen and how it's the current reigning champion in the CPU market, with Intel struggling to keep up.
So where am I, a long-term Intel fan who has finally switched to AMD for the first time in over a decade?
I would say that I am on the boundary edge of switching to AMD for my other computers. Every innovation that they add to their chips such as the recent PCI-E Gen 4 makes me want to stay with AMD more. Performance on my PC is much higher than before, especially saying as I paid less than I have ever done for my PC this time around.
However. AMD's lack of Thunderbolt, particularly in the laptop segment, means that I cannot connect some of the peripherals that I own to my computer. Uh oh.
So what do you think? Team Red or Blue?
After having integrated push notifications into my website way back in early 2016, I'm now removing them from my website altogether. I think we can also agree, push notifications are quite an annoying thing these days and I've decided to remove them from my website - I never sent any for a while anyway.
From now on, the only push notifications that anyone will receive are from my blog. I intend to have an option to subscribe to these somewhere on my websites.
Dash was my main project for a long time, so developing content management systems is not something I have ever had any problems working on, and in fact, they are one of my favourite things to develop.
But now, something new, somewhat inspired by Dash, is about to hopefully become a big success. I'm working on a new major project that I started just this evening and it's set to be my biggest project yet.
Dash 2.0 will rebuild my four-year-in-development project from the ground up, with more focus on object-orientation.
As a web developer myself, I have been through a bunch of editors trying to find the right one and for the last few years, at least the editor of choice to me has been set.
Back in 2016, a friend at the time suggested that I use a different editor. I found that, at least for web development, Atom has been the editor of choice. I say this for many reasons.
The first is cross-platform. Whilst I was originally a Visual Studio user when I moved to Mac OS and Linux machines as my main computers, Visual Studio wasn't cross-platform. This meant I needed to do something different when I switched computers to allow me to edit on both machines.
The second is the number of packages available for it. I use a terminal package that allows me to have an in-built command line at the same time as editing. I use an FTP package to allow me to upload in real-time.
I stand by Atom being my favourite, but it's a difficult call. Visual Studio Code is a definite close second for me, and over the years since I first used both it and Atom, it's got a heck of a lot better.
According to jscharting.com's blog, 95% of web developers asked in a survey actually use either Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime, WebStorm, or VIM as their editor, meaning a huge number of people will be using either of those editors.
Chrome 76 is a big update. That is in my eyes it is. That's because it adds several new features that benefit a huge number of things on my own website and finally, dark mode is coming to Chrome just like Edge, Safari and Firefox.
Another major feature coming to Chrome is that of background-filter: blur which allows the glass kind of effect from Windows Aero to come to the web - use cases for this kind of feature are quite limited in flat design but can be used when displaying a box above another, adding a bit of blur to the background helps make it more readable, sidebars that float over can definitely benefit from this feature and much more.
I use both features on my website for different purposes - but they are trivial and have fallback solutions so that older browsers do not miss out.
So in 9 days, according to the Platform Status page, Chrome 76 will launch and I hope that everyone gets their hands on it as soon as possible.
I was extremely pleased to see Alan Turing being put on the UK's new £50 note. What's more impressive, however, is the attention to detail in this note.
You see the binary string that is on the note that reads 1010111111110010110011000 actually converts to the binary number 23061912 which, believe it or not, is the date Alan Turing was born - 23rd of June 1912.
I found this out from a friend who sent me the following Tweet:
I just got a nice little shiver when working out whether the binary on the ribbon of the new £50 banknote meant anything.
— dan barker (@danbarker) July 15, 2019
1010111111110010110011000 is 23061912 in decimal. Alan Turing was born on the 23rd June 1912. What a nice touch.
RIP, Alan. pic.twitter.com/BUXzrT31FY
Version 1.3 of BalfBar is here and it's is by far the cleanest, simplest, and most beautiful version of the amazing responsive menu bar that I have developed to date.
A major new feature has now finally made it into it. So not only can you have dropdowns in the desktop mode, but you can now have what I call mega menus (previously content menus). These menus are able to contain more than just a list of items - they can contain anything, for example, a login form, a dropdown box - whatever you like. Further to that, to retain compatibility with existing implementations, the mega menu no longer requires the whole menu to follow that pattern and can be nicely mixed with existing dropdowns!
I've been planning on getting BalfComment up and running for a long time and now it's finally here. I'm close to adding this to my own website and will start with my own ZPE Documentation pages.
Once again, BalfComment is neutral to designs.
I recently encountered an article that actually made me think about the way that BalfBar was designed. This article discussed how important it is for something such as BalfBar to be able to support a variety of different users such as those who don't use or permit JavaScript on their website.
Well, as of today, BalfBar supports those people. BalfBar also loads instantly now, so no longer do you need to wait whilst the JavaScript is loaded. If BalfBar hasn't fully loaded by the time the user starts using it because of the JavaScript not fully loading, the user will instead use a CSS version of the menu.
This is not all I have brought to the menu that is now used on all of the websites I have developed. I have brought many new features to the SCSS file that include the ability to have the top items display differently to the internal items as was the case on my own website. There are other minor changes, mainly focused on the SCSS file to make it easier to tailor it to your website.
Also coming soon to BalfBar with BalfBar 1.3 is the megamenu. I have already got a few of these working how I'd like them to but need to add in an option for mobile before it is released.
So it's that time in my life where I change browser again, which seems to be a regular thing for me. So much so that in my bookmarks folder there is a folder called Imported from Firefox which contains a folder called From Google Chrome which contains a folder called Imported from Safari which contains a folder called Imported from IE.
Chrome 76 is just around the corner, looking to a July 30th release this year, and it brings about a feature that the latest version of Firefox also includes. I speak of dark mode.
Dark mode is becoming a more and more popular thing with websites these days. And rightly so since developers like myself tend to be more drawn to the dark interfaces in the development programs (IDEs and text editors) that we use for the majority of our work. Well, now it's coming to browsers and Firefox already has it implemented.
Twitter and Facebook etc all have their own dark modes, but they are not implemented how it should be. The dark mode should be based on the operating system - both Windows 10 and macOS implement a system-wide dark mode that applications should be implementing too.
Chrome 76 Beta implements this. For those who follow me on my website, you may know that a few weeks ago I implemented my own version of dark mode that follows the operating system's dark mode preferences. If the browser has the feature it will turn dark too.
Here's my website in dark mode in Chrome 76:
