The Cozy World

Directed by Steven Spielberg and played by award-winning cast including Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep , the film is about how the Washington Post has obtained the confidential study by the US government on the Vietnam War, and the struggle of whether or not to publish the information. The story itself is nothing out of the box since it is based on a pretty famous event in US history (i.e.: Pentagon Papers ), but the screenplay or the script is what makes this movie truly shines. First of all, the script moves the story slowly, so that without any knowledge of the related events in history, you can still fully understand the situation in that period of time, such as the frustration of the US government on fighting the Vietnam War, and the management issues of the Washington Post on its own survival.  Next, the script showed us the tangling relationships between the US administration personnel (including the First Family) and the media owners in those days, as well as more ...

Currently there are several different ways to create an iOS app, but there are two main approaches at the present time. First, create the app with Swift (the language created by Apple to replace Objective-C) and second, make the app using React Native (the JavaScript UI library created by Facebook). Each approach has it own pros and cons. This article is going to compare the two approaches, and hopefully to give you some ideas of what is involved in each approach before creating your first app. Using Swift Swift is easy to set up for development, you just launch Xcode on your Mac machine and you can start development right away (zero bootstrapping is required). Also, Swift supports Linux (even on Raspberry Pi ) and you can create web apps using Swift as well (using server-side frameworks such as Vapor). However, supporting Linux does not mean you can create a full-blown iOS app purely from Linux, because you need Xcode (i.e.: on your Mac) to compile the app and t...

The main storyline of Wonder (based on a novel with the same name) is about how a boy with facial differences fits into a mainstream primary school, and how his family members manage their own lives, while providing him all the support he requires. Not only the story itself is heartwarming, but also the way the story is told is just brilliant. Wonder is definitely one of the best movies in 2017.  The usual formula for this sort of film typically focuses only on the main character. Lucky for us,  this film took a very different approach, by letting us (the viewers) to see the perspectives from other characters, and the result makes the film both inspiring and refreshing. The main character is a fifth-grade boy (played by Jacob Tremblay ) who was born with a rare medical facial deformity. After years of being home schooled, his parents (played by Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson ) believe it is time for him to enter mainstream school. He also has an older sister (played...

Swift was introduced as a proprietary language by Apple in 2014, and it was open-sourced in 2015. Initially, Swift is used mainly for iOS development, but now developers are starting to use it for web development via the server-side Swift frameworks . One of the frameworks is called Vapor , which is the only one currently written purely in Swift. Codeanywhere is a cloud-based development environment, basically consisting of virtual machines (similar to DigitalOcean ) and a full-fledged code editor. Recently, Codeanywhere has started to provide a Swift container (like the Docker concept), for assisting developers to jumpstart Swift development. Unfortunately, the Swift release provided in the container is only version 2.2, while the Vapor framework requires version 3 or above. This article is going to show you how to upgrade the Swift release in the pre-defined container, download the Vapor framework/example, and launch the Vapor example in the Codeanywhere environment. Step 1...

The film is basically a sequel of the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice  (BvS) movie, and the story is about how Batman assembles the team (i.e.: Justice League) for  protecting Earth, without the presence of Superman  who sacrificed himself previously in the BvS movie. First of all, I have a confession to make, because I do not recall how Superman died when I watch this movie. The only thing I remember about the BvS movie is, the story was pretty flawed in terms of the ridiculous way of how Superman and Batman were being setup to fight each other from the very beginning. Lucky for us, this movie was excellent in the opening on setting the mood of how everyone was missing Superman after his death. With the help of the fantastic soundtrack ( Everybody knows by Sigrid ), and great performance from Louis Lane ( Amy Adams ) and Martha Kent - Superman's adoptive mother ( Diane Lane ), you can really feel the loss from the atmosphere in the first ten minutes of t...

The movie starts with Thor ( Chris Hemsworth ) and Loki ( Tom Hiddleston ) looking for their father - Odin ( Anthony Hopkins ) on Earth with the help of another Marvel superhero - Doctor Strange ( Benedict Cumberbatch ). After Odin introduces the new powerful villain - Hela ( Cate Blanchett ) to Thor and Loki, the two brothers end up in another planet with the gladiator-type arena which really gets the movie started. As shown in the movie trailer, they bump into Hulk ( Mark Ruffalo ) in the arena, and meet another new character Valkyrie ( Tessa Thompson ) along the way. And finally, the four of them teamed up to try save Asgard (i.e.: Thor’s home planet) from Hela’s evil invasion. Frankly, before I saw the movie, I thought it was just another Marvel movie with spectacular computer graphics, but less interesting story and mediocre performance from the cast. And the fact is, the computer graphics are awesome as expected, especially on the IMAX version. But to my surprise, th...

This film is about an elite special force trying to stop a group of terrorists, who wants to control the world, by creating chaos using their advanced weaponry. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is inspired by Hasbro 's famous line of plastic action figures. The main story of the film is about an evil weapons-manufacturing company, who developed an advanced nano-technology, which can “eat up” everything built with metal (like tanks or even the Eiffel Tower ). The terrorists planned to hit the world’s major cities with this new weapon and to control the world as a result. The “Joes” (as what the soldiers of G.I. Joes called themselves) were fighting to stop their plan. Frankly, I was not expecting this film to have any kind of story, because everybody understands this kind of summer action movie is not there to win any Oscar Awards on best picture or best screenplay, it is there to give us (the viewers) all the actions and thrills. But to my surprise, it actually had a main plot and pro...