Lori M Olson #OPED ‐ Our Unvarnished Opinion
Thanks to the crew who complained about the RubyMine RubyMotion plugin. Looks like the source of the RubyMotion plugin has been released to the community to do what they will. Guess it needs some work for 2019.3. Anyone up for it? https://blog.jetbrains.com/ruby/2019/09/ending-sup…
#FITS ‐ Featured in the School
Those who watched Ken Burns’ sweeping miniseries on Country Music may have a new found curiosity about the genre which can only also be satisfied by a visit to it’s spiritual home: Nashville, Tennessee! Well, what could be better than a bit of torch-and-twang combined with creating augmented reality apps. Err, what the…? It’s true, RubyConf Nashville is rapidly approaching and none other than wndxlori is one of the featured speakers! Checkout her session Creating AR Apps with RubyMotion. Yeehaw.
#DRSH ‐ Dragon Riders Slack Highlights
Here’s a word from the ever helpful Martin Kolb about starting off your new GitHub repo on the right foot. You know those .gitignore files that we all tend to, well, ignore? Amir found a site which is dedicated to making your .gitignore files more useful by providing lots of really good templates. The details are this week’s highlight on the Dragon Riders Slack. Thanks, Martin, and also thanks to Toptal, who are the sponsors of the site.
#ANDROID ‐ Nothin’ but…
A little bit of give-and-take in #ANDROID this week. First, the take part: we’re seeing more and more Android examples with Kotlin which describes itself as “a modern, statically typed programming language that will boost your productivity and increase your developer happiness”. Who doesn’t need that? Hey, is there anyone with any Kotlin knowledge in the group? In particular, we’d love to see a little tutorial or blog post on how to translate Kotlin to RubyMotion. Now here’s the give part: an interesting article on creating Android custom views with delegates. Thank you and you’re welcome, respectively.
#GOTW ‐ Gem of the Week
One of the strengths of this community is that so many eyeballs enable an uncanny ability to unearth obscure nuggets from ancient history. For example, buried in the proceedings of the 2016 WWDC, there was a talk on Optimizing App Startup Time (amen to that, by the way). Fast forward to present: Siddharth Gupta announces on Swiftier that there is now a pod merge plugin which “improves your app’s startup time by reducing dynamic frameworks.” Clearly, good things come to those who wait, but don’t want to wait (for their app to open, at least). We’re curious, though, has anyone tried this with a RubyMotion project? If you have, reply and let us know what you found. If you do, we’ll send you a set of the limited edition stickers otherwise only available from us at RubyConf Nashville.
#COMM ‐ Community
iOS 13 brought us a ton of subtle visual changes. So many that it’s hard to keep track of them and, candidly, they can be a little abstract when described. Well, thank you, Sarun W, for taking time to provide these super helpful visuals on the changes to the UINavigationBar. Perhaps this will inspire others to do something similar for other aspects of iOS 13?
#DRGTK ‐ DragonRuby Game Toolkit
How often does something get easier over time? Actually, more often than you might think, as it turns out and here’s an example: the aforementioned Amir has actually made it easier to get your hands on a commercial licence of the DRGTK and also made it easier for teachers, mentors, parents and even Raspberry Pi enthusiasts. You’ve got to be one of those things, right? This further confirms Amir’s status as one of the good guys.
#TWIL ‐ This Week I Learned
A while back we had an item in #RMW about the wonderful world of Google Translate. Ducktor Naldush (seriously?) discovered that while it’s good, it’s not (yet?) capable of divining meaning from context. Word to the wise: don’t forget to check Google Translate’s handiwork. It can sometimes be stunningly wrong with the results either hilarious or catastrophic depending on how your feeling when you discover the problem.
#HAHA ‐ And They All Laughed…
We think there may be a need for this new section which we are tentatively titling #HAHA, for (hopefully?) obvious reasons. This one is from Jesse Squires and it’s about Xcode. Some comedians will tell you that what makes things funny is the hint of truth they contain. Send us your ideas for the new section…you never know, there may be some stickers in it for you, as well.
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Until next time…no matter how good or bad you think you are, always belt it out to the back row.
Double yeehaw.