Lori M Olson #OPED
Hey folks, we are back. Thanks for being patient while I dealt with the final days, death, and funeral of my brother, Jeff. It’s been a rough time for my whole family, and I needed to be there for them.
That said, I don’t have a whole lot of school news right now, so let’s just get back to the rest of the RubyMotion Community news. — wndxlori
#DRGTK: DragonRuby Game Toolkit
We kicked off this new section of #RMW just before we took our hiatus and it’s dedicated to covering the DragonRuby Game Toolkit. We have a couple of items this week:
Born of the bitter experience of shelves of paper documentation just out of date enough to be completely useless, we have a rule around here: do not write one word of documentation you’re not absolutely sure somebody is going to read at some point. OK, that’s a bit of a non-sequitur but we think you get the point. Documentation is important, but in the right quantity and where possible, automated. To that end we have a neat utility from Martin Kolb called the dragon-ruby-documenter which dumps basic DragonRuby documentation. It should be what you need—nothing more and nothing less. Thanks, Martin.
If you claim first hand knowledge of CHIP-8 when it was originally developed you are either a pretty good fibber or really, really old. It’s from the mid-1970s and it enabled development of video games like Pong. In any event, what this world needed was a CHIP-8 interpreter written in DragonRuby and that’s exactly what Mike Martin of Austin, Texas has developed. We’d write more about this but we have to go and spend some time tracking down .wav files with those ‘blip’ and ‘bloop’ sounds Pong used to make. They’re cute right up to the point they become really annoying.
#MSH: Motioneers Slack Highlights
You are a member of the Motioneers Slack team, right? If not, that’s a situation you want to put right before you read any further. With that out of the way, we have two items for you this week:
First up from Ben Eggett is a simple, concise, step-by-step procedure for running DragonRuby on the RetroPie platform. Retro-wha…? Yes, we had to look it up, too. Y’know the cheerfully-named Raspberry Pi single board computer? RetroPie turns said Raspberry Pi into a retro-gaming machine, which sounds like a great idea to us. Ben’s post covers the use of the RetroPie ROM facility to run DragronRuby. A RetroPie ROM is basically a file which contains a copy of an old game console which is then used by RetroPie to emulate that game console. Check out Ben’s procedure here in the #gamedev channel.
Next, Brett Walker kicked off a helpful thread when he asked “is support for RubyMotion in Travis completely gone?” The short answer is NO it’s not gone although a small fix was required as reported by Amir Rajan. By the time you read this, that fix should be done and RubyMotion support in Travis CI should be good to go.
#GOTW: Gem of the Week
We’ll start with Morgan Schweers of CyberFOX Software out of Seattle whose #GOTW is Fusemotion. It’s a really elegant way of marrying RubyMotion to MacFUSE, which allows you to extend native macOS file handling capabilities to third party filesystems. Morgan includes a RubyMotion-MacFUSE sample app to help jumpstart your own work along these lines.
We follow with Dave Anderson’s recommendation for a tool to install multiple versions of Xcode
including version 11. Dave likes Calgary-based Robots and Pencils
simply-named xcodes.
Thanks for the tip, Dave, and it looks really good. By the way, we love featuring Alberta-based shops.
Do you think your contribution to modern software development has been horrendously overlooked by #GOTW? First, our apologies for that oversight. To make amends please LET US KNOW and we’ll be happy to feature it in an upcoming edition of #RMW.
#COMM: Community
It’s our week for twofers as we have two items here in #COMM as well:
Our friends over at JetBrains had an interesting post by Andrey Aksenov back at the end of last month: Learn RubyMine with IDE Features Trainer. It’s for those of us who use 10% of RubyMine’s features 90% of the time and never stop to learn about the productivity gold mines which are in the other 90% of the features. This post has everything you need to kick start your learning curve and get on the road to knowing exactly what all of RubyMine can do.
Boy, some subjects have come up this week which have required liberal use of Wikipedia to sort out. (You do donate to Wikipedia, right? If not, imagine a world without it. But we digress.) This time out we had to (re-)educate ourselves on Synthwave. Huh? Think of the incidental music from Miami Vice (the original TV show, not the movie) and you’re pretty close. But we also didn’t know there is a colour scheme associated with Synthwave. It’s true. Have a desire to make your VS Code all Synthwavy? Robb Owen did and here are the fruits of his labours: synthwave-vscode. You’ll either love it or wish you had the last 75 seconds of your life back.
#TWIL: This Week I Learned
Yep, another twofer. We’re on the verge of overstaying our welcome, so we’ll be brief:
The sage Soroush Khanlou wrote about Coordinators a while back but has since refined his thinking in that regard and provides an update in Coordinators Redux. It’s smart writing which makes for smart reading for smart people.
Also, we found a great resource called Mac Open Web by Brian Warren which is “a collection of open and indie Mac, iOS, and web apps that help promote the open web.” The Big A always needs a little pushback on their ‘walled garden’ view of the world. You can even contribute if you want and we think that would be great if you did.
That’s a Wrap
If it’s unthinkable you might miss a future issue of #RMW, then think about subscribing. It’s simply the right thing to do. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and we really hope you to see you on those platforms.
Until then…well, let’s just say we’re so glad to be back. We missed this place.