Issue 18

3 April 2019

by Lori M Olson

#OPED

A few weeks ago I stumbled across this tweet: Ego Free UX. Things that able developers often don’t consider is the cost of ‘cool’.

You know those cool Twitter names in the weird upside down characters? Total torture for a someone using a screen reader.
Same thing with including emoji’s in your name/handle. Once I became aware of this, I started noticing it everywhere. So, weird custom fonts with limited sizes? Nope. I’ll be sticking to the default fonts, or configuring a custom font that can vary properly with Dynamic Type in my apps.

Custom navigation: sure, for games, I see that all the time. But even there, we have common patterns. For apps?
WHHHYYYY? Have you ever tried to explain a ‘cool new’ iPad app to an 80 year old (yes, there are lots of avid senior iPad users)? They learn the standard app navigation through repetition, because most of the standard apps operate in similar ways. If you throw some strange custom navigation at them they’ll be lost, and they won’t use your app.

Accessibility IS more important than your “new cool”. Consider your audience, and not your ego. #AccessibilityFirst. — wndxlori

#FITS: Featured in the School

By the time you read this, our free one hour webinar ‘#6PackApps: Six Steps from Idea to App Store’ will be a memory. A happy vivid memory, without a doubt, but a memory nonetheless. Couldn’t be there? Here’s the replay which you can watch anytime (for the next 51 hours?… 72 hrs from when it ended anyway) and we encourage you to do so, of course. Also, we can now move on to talking about the full #6PackApps course which kicks off April 9th. In anticipation of that, here’s the next of most commonly asked questions from the previous session:

“Is the course meant more for advanced devs that have already done mobile development?”

In fact, no. The course is intended for the developer who has yet to get an app in the store or has managed to get an app in the store, but not the success for which they had hoped. #6PackApps will provide you with a template—a repeatable process for proceeding from idea to App Store in weeks instead of months or years.

Also, our faithful newsletter readers get an early jump on the limited quantity of April’s discount offer: $20 off RubyMotion Jumpstart. Just use the code APR1920OFF at checkout. This offer expires at 11:59 pm April 9th.

#MSH: Motioneers Slack Highlights

From the Motioneers Slack team we have Anna Naiyyar who is having some success getting share extensions working for her app, but still faces some challenges. If this is territory with which you are familiar, perhaps you can help out? The thread starts with the question is there any way to add share extension in Rubymotion app?

Also, here’s another quick tip which actually applies to any Slack team: ever wish you could unsubscribe from a thread which has become, well, something less than scintillating? Turns out you can according to David Chartier over at Finer Things in Tech. Here’s David’s scintillating post on the matter.

#GOTW: Gem of the Week

This week’s #GOTW is from Eloy Durán previously of CocoaPods fame and currently of Artsy. While it’s from a few years ago, while he worked at FNGTPS, it’s still as applicable today as when it was when originally posted. It’s his take on Functional View and Controller testing with Rubymotion. For those who are a primarily visual learners (like us) there is even a cool little video on Vimeo which is less than six minutes. It could easily be the best six minutes you spend all day.

#COMM: Community

We have two items from the #COMM this week. The first is from Martin Kolb who shows us how to integrate a C library in a RubyMotion OSX project in his post entitled Vendoring C libraries with Rubymotion.

The second is from our own wndxlori. For those of you who know her, you’ll already know she’s not short of opinions and in this post, Why RubyMotion?, she offers a few thoughts on her/our favourite development system, but not before dispensing with JavaScript, Java, Swift and Objective C. Well, you asked, right? You didn’t? She’s going to tell you anyway.

#AHOTW: App Highlight of the Week

We’re drawing a blank this week for #AHOTW so perhaps we’ll use this space to encourage you to nominate somebody’s app—maybe even your own?—in this category. Scroll down to It’s a Wrap and pick one of our social platforms to get in touch. Who knows, it might just be the beginning of something huge for us both.

#TWIL: This Week I Learned

We’re going to #TWIL twice this week:

Although we can visualize the skeptical reaction, we’re just sayin’ that in case you thought we hated all languages except Ruby…then along came Julia. WTF? No, no…seriously, it looks pretty interesting, too. For a high level overview by Juliet Childers of Edgy check out the recent post Why Julia is the Programming Language set to Dominate our Future. Speaking of edgy, the latter certainly fits that category.

For the second #TWIL, how about this walk of shame: Killed by Google. So many dead products. We’re hoping Apple News finally takes the place of our dearly departed Google Reader.

That’s a Wrap

That’s it for this week. Do you want to be absolutely sure you never miss a future issue of #RMW? Better subscribe!! Also, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn for other Newsletter-worthy content between now and then.

Until then…may all your Slack threads be scintillating.

RubyMotion Weekly brought to you by