Lori M Olson I know I’m in Canada 🇨🇦, so I’m supposed to be used to the cold, but the polar vortex finally moved in this weekend and man is it cold 🥶. And no end in sight, either. Hope all of you are staying warm!
Breaking NEWS
I’m sacrificing the school feature this week for some breaking news in the RubyMotion world. Amir welcomes two new partners to RubyMotion - Aaron Lasseigne & Ryan Gordon. In Amir’s words from the Motioneers Slack:
Exciting news for RubyMotion: I’ve brought on two partners/ owners/stewards (each with equal stake in the product). Official announcement coming eventually :-)
What will change: Each partner will be focused on improving different aspects of RubyMotion (as opposed to spreading myself thin). Feel free to ask any questions if you’d like (which I’ll address here and on the official entry).
The short version is that bringing on partners that think like me would have been a wrong move. So I found people that fill in my weaknesses. That took two years 😬 I mean I don’t have very many weaknesses 🙃 Say hello to partners @Aaron Lasseigne and @icculus.
On the spectrum of outward-facing-public-community-management to deep-in-the-weeds-technical-stuff: @Aaron Lasseigne is on the far left, I’m in the middle, @icculus is on the far right.
This is fantastic news for the community, and I’m excited for what this means for the future of RubyMotion. And of course for Amir to have some great new partners to help out and take some of the load off.
Slack Highlights
This past week, Reuben Ramon started a discussion about using native libs in RubyMotion. There are definite limits to the numbers of RubyMotion specific gems (not all Ruby gems are compatible, since RubyMotion does not have the full stdlib of Ruby). However, one can use native libraries, written in other languages, in RubyMotion. For iOS and macOS development, motion-cocoapods gives us access to all the Objective C libs (and some Swift, if they include an Objective C bridge). And for Android, motion-gradle helps us build and link to native Android libs written in Java.
And if you haven’t signed up for Slack yet, you can get access by going to motioneers.herokuapp.com.
Gem of the Week
The all-purpose Swiss Army knife of RubyMotion development - BubbleWrap, is our Gem of the Week. BubbleWrap is huge, and provides numerous wrappers to help make your RubyMotion code look less like Objective C and more like Ruby. Because BubbleWrap is so huge, it’s broken down into pieces that can be individually required in your Gemfile. But for all it’s popularity, it’s looking a bit neglected these days. I certainly wouldn’t object if anyone wanted to step up and start cleaning up some of the backlog of issues and PR’s…
I’m featuring RubyMotion gems here each week. Sometimes because they are awesome, and sometimes because they need some love. Remember, if you have a gem you’d like featured, just reply to this email, or you can PM me in Slack!
Community
All quiet on the Community Forum front. But… Amir did manage to add an extra bit of hype to his new partners announcement. There will be another big announcement coming in April at Ruby Kaigi! And, since I know most of the RubyMotion gems use TravisCI for their continuous integration tool, I thought you would like to know that Travis CI has been acquired by Idera.
And here’s your reminder to introduce yourself on the Hello World post on the community forum!
App Highlight of the Week
Once again, we have an entirely too modest app creator, Brian Walton. His Tagify is an app that helps beverage distributors create great custom signage for their products. This is a great example of an app targeting a niche audience, and providing tonnes of value. Nicely done!
Psst!!! If you have an app (even if it’s not in the App Store) send me the details, and I’ll add it to the list to be featured!
TWIL (This Week I Learned) Links
This week I learned… that you can watch the ASCII version of Star Wars from your terminal! Enjoy!
That’s it for this week!
Regards, Lori