Lori M Olson This week’s big news is the official announcement from Amir Rajan about the new, long term strategy for RubyMotion which is being rolled out under the DragonRuby brand. Amir covers off the details in a newsy post entitled The Sleeping Dragon Has Awoken, And Is Filled With A Terrible Resolve. Amir’s announcement is a must read for RubyMotion developers.
Not surprisingly, said announcement has generated some interesting discussion regarding some of the past challenges facing RubyMotion developers and what DragonRuby might do to address these going forward. Amir does a great job in a forthright, candid albeit fairly lengthy Twitch.tv video. It’s also well worth your time particularly if it saves you endless forum chats obtaining basically the same information.
The other headline coming out of the DragonRuby announcement is the addition of two new partners (as we have discussed before) in DragonRuby:
Aaron Lasseigne who will primarily be responsible for the health and expansion of RubyMotion’s OSS ecosystem. This includes providing support for existing maintainers and also taking direct responsibility for maintaining the OSS portions of RubyMotion.
Ryan Gordon will primarily be responsible for expanding ‘Ruby Everywhere Else’, which is to say beyond iOS, Android and Mac platforms. Where might that be, you ask? That’s another good reason to watch Amir’s video as there are some tantalizing hints in there. Ryan will also provide input to Aaron and Amir with to their OSS initiatives.
We think DragonRuby represents a positive development and we will be tracking it closely moving forward. We encourage our newsletter readers to do the same. By the way, the ‘Sleeping Dragon’ title of Amir’s post is an interesting (and Googleworthy) cinematic reference to which we say ‘hopefully not’.
Featured in the School
As of this (that is, Wednesday) morning, we have opened up a very limited number of early bird spots for the 6 Pack Apps session coming up in April. For just the next 72 hours, you will receive the one-and-only discount that will be offered for this 10 week course. Once these early bird seats are gone, full price (but with lots of exciting bonuses, of course) will be the only option. Sign up now before this chance disappears!
Slack Highlights
What jumped off the page for us this week was @cmckni3 (Chris Knight) and @calicoday working through some issues regarding watchOS and provisioning to an actual Apple Watch. If you’re developing apps in this space, it’s well worth a glance and can be found here on the Motioneers Slack.
And if you haven’t signed up for Slack yet, you can get access by going to motioneers.herokuapp.com.
Gem of the Week
There is a lot of discussion these days (thanks EU!) about obtaining explicit user consent and to do so in a way which establishes users’ trust while maintaining a seamless experience. This nice little CocoaPod from Smartlook takes the pain out of obtaining tracking and analytics data regarding your users’ consent. It comes complete with an Objective C example which really should be trivial to translate to RubyMotion. You can find it on Smartlook’s GitHub.
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
It’s just possible that with Amir’s 55 minute video related to the DragonRuby announcement (see above) you may have heard enough from him this week? IMPOSSIBLE. Here, Amir talks about classic video game development with Ruby and who isn’t interested in that?
And here’s your reminder to introduce yourself on the Hello World post on the community forum!
App Highlight of the Week
I’m STILL OUT OF more apps to feature, so if you have an app (even if it’s not in any of the App Stores) send me the details, and I’ll add it to the list to be featured!
Meanwhile if you are looking for a little free publicity for your mobile app, Craig Grannell— whose credits include no less than @StuffTV, @TapSmart, @TechRadar, @MacFormat and @MacworldUK—wants to be contacted about what it is your working on. As he says “if you make great things, I want to write about them”. Challenge accepted. Contact information is in his Twitter profile.
TWIL (This Week I Learned) Links
An interesting commentary from Antoine v.d. Lee (https://www.avanderlee.com) on modern iOS networking API’s and specifically Alamofire vs. URLSession. With apologies to Bill Shakespeare: “To library or not to library” that is the question.
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Otherwise, we hope everybody has a great week and see you seven days from…from…from…NOW!
– The Editor