Interesting Links #5

There was a new plugins release on the 20th. If you’re using any core plugins, you should definitely check the release notes in the post.
PhoneGap Desktop App 0.3.1 was released to fix an issue some users were having. If you’re using the desktop app, be sure to update!
If you want more than just a “hello world” app, Star Track is a great example. It uses Framework7 which is a beautiful framework for cross-platform development. The app is going to serve as the basis for documentation from the PhoneGap team, so be sure to subscribe to their blog.
If you’re using Visual Studio Code, you might want to check out this PhoneGap Day US presentation: VS Code tools for Cordova

Flex box is awesome! If you want some UI examples, see Flexbox patterns. Good stuff there. Via HTML5Weekly

Stanford is running their course entitled “Developing iOS 9 Apps with Swift” on iTunes U. I haven’t checked it out, but if it’s anything like their other courses, and you want to learn Swift, I’d say hop in!
Swift has the concept of interactive playgrounds — this collection of playgrounds looks like an interesting way to learn Swift.
On the same theme, Hipster Swift: Demystifying The Mysterious is definitely worth a read if you ever come across something in Swift that makes you go “wtf?”

It’s amazing to think that there are people out there who still make games and the like for the old 8-bit computers. It’s a fascinating rabbit hole to go down should you ever want to spend a few days procrastinating. Via a Reddit post I came across the NOMAM 2016 Basic Tenliners Competition. As the name suggests, these are BASIC games that are no longer than 10 lines long. Of course, lots of tricks are pulled to make this work — BASIC, like many other programming languages, supports multiple statements per line, so this isn’t the same thing as a 10-statement BASIC program. Some of the games are actually quite impressive! Kevin Savetz goes through the Atari programs on YouTube, so if you don’t want to download the programs, the videos give you an idea as to what the games look like.

Apparently Japanese priests collected almost seven centuries of climate data (via Hacker News), and the records confirm what we already know: the climate is changing quickly, and we’d better start paying attention (as a collective). Unfortunately, anything we do now will only partially mitigate the damage we’ve already caused, but even a little bit of mitigation is better than none at all.
Should saving our own planet not work out, it turns out SpaceX is planning a Mars mission with their Dragon 2 spacecraft (via Hacker News). The thought itself is really very cool, and goodness, I’m crossing my fingers, because we might just need a way off our own planet sometime in the future!