Issue 37

18 September 2019

by Lori M Olson

#OPED—Our Unvarnished Opinion

Y’all know I have two dogs, right? Well, if you didn’t, you should go follow me on my Instagram account, which, if I was being honest, should probably be renamed WNDXDogs. Anyway, our dogs are great fun, and also make us happy. When I have the opportunity to take the dogs with me on visits to my “office away from office” tecconnect, I do it. Because the smiles I see on all the other people’s faces when I do bring the dogs along made me realize that they make other people happy too. It’s a good feeling to bring happiness to other people. Seems like a good philosophy for app development. Do your apps make people smile? If not, what could you change to make that happen? – wndxlori

#DRSH—Dragon Riders Slack Highlights

From the Dragon Riders Slack team, there is word from Amir that RubyMotion 6.3 beta 2 is now available. He adds the comment “[t]his release has quite a few fixes to native interoperability and framework dependency resolution”. Get it while it’s hot!

#GOTW—Gem of the Week

While we know this isn’t a gem exactly, this may come in really handy if you decided to develop one in the future: Open Source Guides provide that always appreciated, all-in-one-place manual on how to launch and manage an open source project. These were originally created and curated by GitHub, but they stress they are intended to aggregate community best practices as opposed to being the gospel according to GitHub. They’re a really good read.

#COMM—Community

One thing which sometimes gets short shrift is the way things get named in our code. Here’s a counterpoint to that: Name Translation from C to Swift describes how C and Objective-C declarations are translated to Swift. It provides specific recommendations as to how the names are adjusted in the process. We like this disciplined, organized approach. While it is obviously Swift-specific, we still think it will be helpful for RubyMotion developers making a similar transmogrification of C and Objective-C to RubyMotion.

#AHOTW/#DRGTK—App Highlight of the Week/DragonRuby Game Toolkit

A twofer, of sorts, this week. Not only is it our #AHOTW, but it’s implemented using our favourite game engine, the Dragon Ruby Game Toolkit. What’s not to love! In any event, the prolific Okaeri Studio drops Dwarfs Gone Deeper. Great 2D, mid-1980s game design vibe that’s pretty addictive. Oh, yes, and we checked: dwarfs and dwarves are both legitimate plurals. Who knew? We didn’t.

#FITS—Featured in the School

WNDXlori is teaching a series of live-in-person workshops through the Women Entrepreneurs in STEM grant at tecconnect. These Code School programs will introduce the basics. First up, this week, is Tools of the Trade, where WNDXlori will re-introduce our learners to their computers…from the point of view of a developer. If you happen to be near beautiful Lethbridge, Alberta you should really check the sessions out. The WNDXlori live show is definitely one not to be missed. Of course, if you wait long enough, these new courses will be making an appearance in the WNDX School!

#TWIL—This Week I Learned

Ever conducted an entire email conversation using nothing but Google Translate? We have, and it’s always surprising how well that works. Two parties, with absolutely no knowledge of the other parties native language, still able to communicate reasonably well with each other. We think that has profound implications but that’s also clearly another subject for another time and venue. But did you know that the prodigious capabilities of Google Translate can also be used with Google Docs? Leon Fayer shows us how in this recent tweet. We know. Holy crap. Thanks, Leon, that’s so cool!

That’s a Wrap!

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Until next time…do not transmogrify and drive.

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