Lori M Olson This week I’m pretty happy to be working on course planning for the fall. I will be teaching (live-in-person) coding skills in a program for Women Entrepreneurs. Eventually these courses will make an appearance in the WNDX School, helping me achieve one of my personal & business goals, which is increasing diversity in the app developer community. Not that I don’t love all you guys creating apps (because I do)… but let’s face it, you’re about as likely to be writing apps to help track women’s menstrual cycles as I am to be writing apps about erectile dysfunction. And young adults will write different apps than parents with small children will write, and people with aging parents will write different apps than outdoor enthusiasts will write. All those apps are useful and will find an audience and will help people, but unless we have developers from all genders and demographics writing those apps… many of them will never get thought of, much less made. – wndxlori
#DRSH—Dragon Riders Slack Highlights
A little while back we talked about Apple mandating the notarization of all applications. This has broad implications for all developers which Apple explains on this page if you need a quick refresher.
Fortunately this process has been streamlined due in no small part to the yeoman efforts of Martin Kolb as described in this recent post to the Dragon Riders Slack team. Notarization tasks have been moved to their own namespace, which is to say rake notarize. A couple of things have been added: rake notarize_history is for, as you might expect, viewing your notarization history and rake notarize:staple staples the ticket and rezips the app. Pretty convenient, we think.
This looks great, Martin, and just one thing we’ll add: don’t forget to run motion repo to get this important update. Oh, right and for those who are wondering where #MSH went, the external branding of the Slack team has been relaunched under the whizzy Dragon Riders name…hence #MSH is now #DRSH. Now you know.
#GOTW—Gem of the Week
This week’s #GOTW has a kinda meta vibe in that it’s not a gem exactly, but rather a more modern gem manager. Bundler has been around for donkey’s years—since time began in the land time forgot?—so it may be time to try something a shade more modern. For example, how about Gel whose primary contributor is Matthew Draper out of beautiful Adelaide, Australia? Gel is described on their site as “a work in progress” but otherwise “a light alternative to Bundler”. We think it’s definitely worth a look and you can find the code on GitHub.
If you give it a whirl, by all means, tweet us your thoughts—we’d love to incorporate your comments into a future #RMW.
#COMM—Community
With the NBA season just around the corner (finally…we’ve just about enough of summer filler on the sports channels!) we’re intrigued with Jamon Holmgren’s Player Popularity app which “lets you rank your favourite (and least favourite) players in the NBA!” That is so cool! Actually, that’s not the #COMM news item but we couldn’t let our enthusiasm for the game slide on that one.
The real #COMM news item is pretty humorous, though, and that’s how to find the right workaround on a Github issue. Jamon’s theory is that you should “always look for the long line of emojis to find the real answer”. That’s brilliant advice we will heed before future banging-our-head-on-a-brickwall sessions.
Oh, when we finally get our hands on Jamon’s app, our answers are Kawhi Leonard if he had signed with the Raps? No. 1. Kawhi Leonard playing for the Clippers? No. 486. #WeTheNorth
#AHOTW—App Highlight of the Week
Not crickets this time. Cicadas. It is the height of summer, after all (at least in the Northern Hemisphere).
#DRGTK—DragonRuby Game Toolkit
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Last week Amir told us to ‘move our butts over to Discord’ and summarily archived the #DRGTK channel on Slack. Minor glitch: URL links are not supported in Discord so making the connection from this to that is a little trickier. In any event, the item of interest this week is that stack tracing for DragonRuby has been merged into DragonRuby proper. That’s going to make debugging your games much easier!
#FITS—Featured in the School
Back at the end of July, wndxlori mentioned in the #OPED she was starting on a couple of iOS & Android wrapper apps for a client’s Rails application. This will be turned into an new course in the school. However, if you are interested in the ‘guts’ of this process, you are welcome to join her ‘behind the scenes’ list which will receive regular updates, starting this week. However you need to let us know as soon as possible—hit REPLY and let us know you want to be added to the list.
#TWIL—This Week I Learned
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| Every once in a while we come across somebody who has ‘mad skillz’ for teaching. Without question Michael “Walking River” Callaghan is one of those people. Here’s a brilliant example: [What the ~ | & | &&$!`()?](https://dev.to/walkingriver/what-the-177l?utm_source=rubymotionweekly.com&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_content=32) for some real mind-bending command line magic. All that, and Michael gets to work at Walt Disney World in Orlando. #WeTheNorth are really jealous. |
That’s a Wrap!
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Until next time, may all of your efforts be yeoman.