Issue 42

23 October 2019

by Lori M Olson

#OPED ‐ Our Unvarnished Opinion

I’m still so mad I could spit nails. Apparently when I reported an issue on RubyMine with the RubyMotion plugin, and they reported that it was “fixed” in version 2019.3, they meant it was fixed because they’ve removed RubyMotion support completely. JetBrains picked a bad week to remind me about my upcoming subscription renewal. Guess it’s time to look for a new IDE. Any suggestions?

#DRGTK ‐ DragonRuby Game Toolkit

Have you ever heard of ray casting? Neither had we, but Jason McGee gave us a reason to look it up. He mentioned it in his tweet about his new maze game he has been developing using our favourite gaming toolkit. What’s that, you ask? Why DragonRuby Gaming Toolkit, of course! (It is in the title of this section, after all).

#DRSH ‐ Dragon Riders Slack Highlights

Frequent contributor Don Wei kicked off an interesting thread in the Dragon Riders’ Slack team wherein he enquired as to whether ProMotion-menu was broken. Turns out it was. But that’s OK because Andrew Havenspromptly put it right with a 1.1.1 release which you can get now on GitHub.

#ANDROID ‐ Nothin’ but…

That paragon of free speech (or maybe they’re just rants?), reddit, featured a spirited discussion on the state of Android cross-device sync. Or, rather, the lack of it. Net-net-net: this is why you at least start on iOS for mobile. We are going to get letters about this one, we just know.

#GOTW ‐ Gem of the Week

Here’s an innovation on the usual #GOTW format. We’re highlighting an gem we loved, but is rapidly in the process of going away, in a manner of speaking. Yep, HockeyApp is a goner, having been subsumed into Microsoft’s App Center. ‘Nuff said. So…anybody have any alternatives to suggest? If you do, hit reply and let us know. We would love to share that information in a future edition of the #RMW. Meanwhile, if you were using Joe Noon’s HockeyApp handiwork at motion-hockeyapp or motion-hockeyapp-task, it might be time to pull those out of your project.

#COMM ‐ Community

We have a couple of items from the #COMM this week, with the common thread between the two is that they both fall into the category of Catalina#thingstodo. The first is from from the Code Friar himself (AKA Kevin Poorman) where he provides a very quick fix for those having trouble with screen sharing after the upgrade. The second is from Dave Wood who solved the problem of cron permissions that prevented cron jobs from running. Thank you, gentlemen, we really appreciate the help!

#AHOTW ‐ App Highlight of the Week

We don’t know how you feel about it, but every time we see perfectly good food going to waste, our heart sinks. For those who feel there has to be a better way, consider following the lead of Canadian company Flashfoodwhich recently garnered some earned media with our national broadcaster. We guarantee your reaction to the story will be equal parts “that’s such a great idea” and the obligatory “why didn’t I think of that.”

#TWIL ‐ This Week I Learned

The good news is that Muhammad A. Khan brings us word of a free book on data science available. The not-so-good news is that Muhammad warns us it’s “not for the faint of heart.” However, Foundations of Data Science out of Cornell Computer Science is clearly worthy of your time. Save it for the beach, next summer.

That’s a Wrap!

We have always got some interesting things in the works so you won’t want to miss a single, solitary issue of the #RMW. Subscribe! We’re also on TwitterFacebook and LinkedIn and we really hope you to see you on those platforms.

Until next time, anybody dressing up as a block of RubyMotion code for Hallowe’en? If not, we just might.

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