Issue 22

1 May 2019

by Lori M Olson

#OPED

In a time where Apple is doubling down on privacy, and kicking apps out of the store for violating rules around privacy & security, Facebook and Twitter seem to be moving…at least at cross-purposes, if not outright in the opposite direction. I don’t think social media is a positive influence any more. If you can’t go as far as removing the SDK, then spend some quality time with the documentation, and make sure that you are not accidentally helping social media services to violate the privacy & security of your customers or your customers friends & followers.

iMore: Why Apple pulled screen time apps from the App Store

MacObserver: Mark Zuckerberg Sweats as Regulators Hungrily Eye Him Up

MacObserver: Developers, it’s Time to Delete the Facebook SDK

Your thoughts? Let me know! Otherwise, until next week… wndxlori

Our own wndxlori has become something of a media darling with her recent appearances on two (count ‘em!) two more prominent dev-oriented podcasts. If you have been ten feet underwater for the last couple of weeks and haven’t heard, check out her upcoming interviews on My Ruby Story with Charles Max Wood and Greater Than Code with Janelle Klein and Jamey Basheer. Subscribe to either and/or both of these fine shows to know instantly when the new episodes are available. Of course, that’s in addition to her appearance on the Ruby Rogues, also with with Charles Max Wood, from a few of weeks back.

Drunk with her new celebrity, wndxlori has agreed to offer a previously unheard of 20% discount on all offerings in the WNDXschool. As you likely know, these discounts are rare, so best take advantage of the opportunity before she sobers up! Use coupon APR1920OFF until May 8.

#DRGTK: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

To keep up with the flood of information coming out about the DragonRuby Game Toolkit, we are opening of a new section of the #RMW to cover just this one topic. (It also makes it easy to skip if game development isn’t your thing). We’re kicking off with Martin Kolb reverse engineering these classes & methods from the DragonRuby GTK for your enlightenment and edification. Thanks, Martin!

Also, we now have an Awesome List for DragonRuby which you can find in the unsurprisingly named Awesome DragonRuby.

We know, that’s…umm…awesome, right?

#MSH: Motioneers Slack Highlights

Have you been getting ERROR! The Android NDK installed on your system does not support API level 28. Run ‘motion android-setup’ to install a more recent NDK version (or words to that effect) lately? Never fear, Aaron Lasseigne has a cure for what ail’s ya. Spoiler alert: your configuration block may need a little work.

#GOTW: Gem of the Week

Announced at RubyKaigi 2019, Sorbet provides high performance type checking for Ruby in an annotation style. It’s intended for Ruby, but we can also see this helping with RubyMotion/DragonRuby. A lot. There is even a playground environment for you to experiment with Sorbet. Don’t you wish everybody would provide one of those?

#COMM: Community

We have quite the assortment this week, starting with some words of warning from Thomasbcn for the Android users among us. The headline caught us by surprise: “Malware installed from Google Play doubled in 2018” Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

Next, and while it’s not specific to RubyMotion, the caveats and pitfalls section on this article about NSUserDefaults is jam-packed full of stuff you really need to to know about.

And, finally, in our very once-in-a-while ‘ask not what [blank] can do for you, but what you can do for [blank]’ item, Holger could use a hand with this Firebase error code: Objective-C stub for message fetchWithExpirationDuration:completionHandler:’ type v@:d@?’ not precompiled. Can anybody out there offer him a helping hand?

#AHOTW: App Highlight of the Week

Our #AHOTW section really depends on our readers providing worthy candidates for our careful curation. Barring that, we’ll rubber stamp whatever you send and blindly pass it along to our large and growing readership. However, until such time that actually happens, it’s going to be ALL GAMES ALL THE TIME, because that’s what people are sharing right now. Now if that doesn’t get you filling out the nomination paperwork, we don’t know what will. While you’re doing that, check out Flappy Dragon. Name kind of says it all.

#TWIL: This Week I Learned

Want to enhance the discoverability of your app? We do. Always. If you do, too, check out this week’s #TWIL: Spotlight Indexing for Your App Content. We had no idea you could set up deep linking to your app this way. Very, very cool.

That’s a Wrap

Another week come and gone and April is a quickly fading memory. If it’s unthinkable you might miss a future issue of #RMW, then subscribing is in everybody’s best interests. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and we really hope you do.

Until then…may all your links be deep.

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