Lori M Olson #OPED ‐ Our Unvarnished Opinion
So, RubyConf. Wow. I had a great time in Nashville last week, and an even better time presenting my new talk, Creating Augmented Reality Apps with RubyMotion. Lots of new Ruby folks in the audience, and thus new to RubyMotion as well. One of the most 樂 moments for me was that 9 out of 10 people, after the talk, came up to ask if they could use RubyMotion on Android… Seems like some more introductory Android material is in order for the school. Meanwhile, check out the page I made for people from RubyConf to find out about RubyMotion and the examples from my talk.
The other impactful moment from RubyConf was Sandi Metz’ keynote on the last day, titled Lucky You. Although the official videos have yet to be released, the live stream capture for Sandi’s talk starts here and is WELL WORTH the time to watch.
And last, although I am a Canadian, I would be remiss if I failed to offer a Thanksgiving greeting to all our US subscribers. Happy Turkey Day!
#COMM ‐ Community
We are not only in awe of the coding skills and technical expertise of our community. We’re also in awe of their imagination. Take, for example, appiconpreview from Max Ott. Max imagined a better and easier way of visualizing what your app icon is going to look like in all the places it’s eventually seen. Drag-n-drop your favourite square image to it and see what you think.
#AHOTW ‐ App Highlight of the Week
We’re not the kind to stand in a Walmart lineup all Thanksgiving just so we can beat up (or more likely be beat up by) our fellow shoppers to save $50 on a flat screen TV we don’t actually need. However, that’s not stopping us from jumping on the Black Friday/Cyber Monday bandwagon. But not in the way you might expect. Our #AHOTW this week is not an app at all but rather a place for you, the independent iOS developer, to get some additional coverage for whatever BFCM promos you’re running. Thanks to Bryan Dubno for setting up this Airtable for all of us. What a great idea!
#DRGTK ‐ DragonRuby Game Toolkit
Also in the category of things we would never have imagined ourselves, turns out the DragonRuby Game Toolkit is a great tool to teach programming to those who might think computers only do ‘boring stuff’. Rich Kilmer relates the story of how he and his son updated Pong as a learning exercise. What a brilliant idea. Local school districts…are you listening? We need more great devs and this early inspiration could get kids pointed in the right direction.
#FITS ‐ Featured in the School
We’re pleased to report that WNDXlori’s presentation at RubyConf was a huge hit. While the full-length video is in the works, here’s 25 seconds cleverly bootlegged by Eric Hodel to get you started. We’re also laughing with, not at, our fearless leader’s new nickname: Mother of Dragons, as coined by Simply Business Tech. We think it has a nice Game of Thrones ring to it.
#DRSH ‐ Dragon Riders Slack Highlights
Some of our regular sources of invaluable nuggets, Don Wei and Andrew Havens, exchange thoughts on upgrading Ruby for your RubyMotion projects. Which, by the way, you need to be on by now. See, you really do want to be a member of the Dragon Riders Slack…if you’re not already.
#ANDROID ‐ Nothin’ but…
Something which often gets lost in translation (figuratively speaking) is Android apps being targeted at a broad range of devices some of which have really big screens. Here’s a great article on on how to drive engagement on these devices. Think of it as better living through more pixels.
#GOTW ‐ Gem of the Week
Want a super easy way for your app to have a global settings entry in the Settings app? There’s a bundle for that. Thanks to Nick Quaranto for this, that’s a huge timesaver.
#TWIL ‐ This Week I Learned
One TLA* which may have given you pause to say WTF is HSB particularly if you don’t like to RTFM (like us). Raheel gives us the 411. Spoiler alert: Hue, Saturation and Brightness. And no, that’s not a new DC law firm.
#HAHA ‐ And They All Laughed…
Surely everyone’s seen this joke before? Maybe not.
That’s a Wrap!
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Oh and, yes, Roast Turkey with Chocolate Sauce is a thing. Sounds delicious.
*TLA: three letter acronym.