Issue 26

3 July 2019

by Lori M Olson

#OPED

No newsletter last week, because I was off camping in the mountains with my husband and our two dogs. Somehow I managed to forget to mention I was going on vacation in the June 19th edition. Oops, sorry.

Didn’t realize how burnt out I was, either, until after I got back. Suddenly my concentration and focus are sharp, and the amount of work I’ve managed to tackle since our return is more than I managed to get done in a whole week before we left. Don’t underestimate the impact burnout and stress has on your ability to function. After a little over a week off (Monday was a holiday here in Canada, too), I’m back at full function, but that week was completely off. No email, no phone calls, no work at all.

If you are feeling any of these signs of burnout, make sure you pay attention, and take a mental health break. – wndxlori

#FITS: Featured in the School

We’re feverishly getting ready for the official launch of our RubyMotion Testing In Depth course. We are really excited to get this out the door and into the wild.

One of the really pleasant side benefits of this background work is that we come across all manner of neat little snippets like this one from Coderwall in 2016. It’s a way to check for existing instances of UIAlertView in apps which run with versions of iOS prior to iOS 8 and without the need for having to setup a full blown feature test. Check out Testing the presence of a UIAlertView in RubyMotion on iOS7. Now, I know that UIAlertView is deprecated, but this is still an interesting pattern to consider for testing.

If you already have the early, ill-defined symptoms of FOMO, it’s probably because the advance price of $25 for RubyMotion Testing In Depth won’t last much longer. That’s an absolute steal for three full hours of really valuable content. Get it while it’s hot!

#DRGTK: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

This week, from San Francisco-based Danny Page, we have a sample app demonstrating some interesting capabilities which you will undoubtedly find useful at some point. This includes the inclusion of new classes, the creation of buttons to update state, management of the update loop and effortlessly adding new colour schemes.

What we’re keen to know is at which gig Danny is going to be using these capabilities—NerdWallet or Skrimmage Sports or maybe something stealth on which he’s working? Any of the above would be intriguing.

#MSH: Motioneers Slack Highlights

You may have gotten tired of hearing about it, but we’re far from tired of reminding you, if you are not already a member of the Motioneers Slack team then becoming one is something you should really do. Or legitimately fear missing out on items like the following from team member Lantao Liu:

Recently in the #general channel Lantao lamented the fact that Clay Allsopp’s motion-toolbox.com collection of libraries and wrappers wasn’t coming back any time soon. Seeing that as more of an opportunity than a problem, Lantao forked the project, made some minor updates and—PRESTO!—the Motion Toolbox is reborn.

Thanks, Lantao, and I’m sure a lot of folks are going to find this really useful.

#GOTW: Gem of the Week

This week’s #GOTW comes to us from David Larrabee who has come up with motion-pusher, a RubyMotion wrapper for Tom Kemp’s libPusher which, in turn, provides an Objective-C interface to Pusher Channels.

We have to admit that some of us had to do a little digging to understand the implications of all that. Apparently, what you really need to know is that Channels provide you with flexible pub/sub messaging, live user lists, access control and integrations with the likes of Slack and Datadog.
Sounds pretty good to us if you can do all that and not leave the cozy confines of Ruby code for your app development.

Would you like your gem to be featured in #GOTW? By all means, let us know and we’ll be happy to tell the world in an upcoming edition of #RMW.

#COMM: Community

We have a couple of items for #COMM in this week’s issue:

From none other than The Big A comes word that “links generated for apps on the App Store now begin with apps.apple.com.” There’s not much more to it than that, but here’s the article from their News and Updates section. You certainly can’t fault them for being too verbose, at least. Make sure you start updating all your App Store links (although the old ones still redirect).

Also, from the Community Forum, we also have a very thoughtfully written question from Jan Jacobs about the potential of RubyMotion for developing a new sharing app. Amir and Andrew promptly weighed in with helpful answers.

Not joined the Community Forum yet? You really ought to, and you’re going to love the price.

#AHOTW: App Highlight of the Week

As with the previous edition of the #RMW, this could also have appeared in the #DRGTK section but we chose to include it here as a reminder we would love to feature your app in this space, too.

This week, Sean Scally contributes a ‘serviceable but boring’ (his words, not ours!) version of the arcade classic Breakout originally from 1976. To which we can only say what goes around (eventually) comes around. Again. And again. Seriously, though, if so-old-it’s-new-again Breakout is what you crave, here’s where you can find it.

Now, if we could just find that greatest hits album from KC and The Sunshine Band, our lives would be complete. Utterly lame, but complete.

#TWIL: This Week I Learned

We should have temporarily renamed this section TWIR (as in ‘Reminded’). This is because we were recently reminded the word ‘computer’ originally had nothing to do with the things we now carry around in our pockets and from which we rarely glance away. It was actually the job description for a person who manually did the math (probably with a slide rule) for large scale, compute-intensive projects like the space program. The reminder came via a tweet by Hashnode and we thank them for that little trip down memory lane.

Want an even more vivid illustration of a ‘computer’ of the human kind? Check out the excellent 2016 movie Hidden Figures starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae. We just love these ladies. Well worth 126 minutes of your time and then some. It is the ‘summer of space’ after all.

That’s a Wrap

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Until next time, may your missing out not be feared.

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