Lori M Olson #OPED ‐ Our Unvarnished Opinion
At RubyConf a few weeks ago, one of the points that Matz focused on was (again) programmer happiness. Although a lot of work has been done on performance, and more is to come, it became clear that Matz would choose programmer happiness over performance. And that’s a good thing. I know that Ruby has taken a lot of hits because “performance” in the past, but it’s important to keep in mind that for 99% of the cases out there, Ruby’s performance is perfectly fine. I mean, if it’s good enough for Shopify and it’s good enough for Stripe, it’s probably good enough for you and I, too.
But there’s more to it than that. RubyMotion (and DragonRuby) and the ecosystem that has developed in support, make me happy. I tried Objective C. I really did. And I hated it so much. And Swift… it’s been moving fast and breaking things, which really wasn’t what I look for in a language. And now that it’s finally slowing down, Swift is approaching the complexity of Java… at the same time that Android developers are abandoning Java in droves, moving to Kotlin. Complexity just isn’t something to look for in a language either. I like my code to be clear, readable, and testable. That’s what RubyMotion and DragonRuby are providing. And keeping me happy.
#DRGTK ‐ DragonRuby Game Toolkit
Sometimes your NDHP (non-denominational holiday period) gift comes early and today is one of those days. Artem Brullov has created a whole series of character assets which are ready to use in your DragonRuby game. Thanks, Art!
#FITS ‐ Featured in the School
We were tracking progress on this last week, and the folks at Confreaks really came through. They have all of the RubyConf 2019 videos up on YouTube. There, you can find both WNDXLori’s session as well as the entire RubyConf playlist.
Also, the revamp of the WNDX School’s home page is under way and it’s looking great. But that’s all we’re saying for now. Watch this space for more free content in the New Year. In the interim, don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss out on the upcoming announcement.
#DRSH ‐ Dragon Riders’ Slack Highlights
From the Dragon Riders Slack (previously-known-as the Motioneers) comes news that REPL output is not showing up in NSlog. The ensuing thread includes a great workaround by Amir Rajan. Word is it will also be more fully addressed in RubyMotion 7.1.
Also from the Dragon Riders this week is another great tip from Amir on an update he made to motion doctor to make it easier to post an environment dump.
Thanks, Amir, both are really helpful.
#ANDROID ‐ Nothin’ but…
A consistent visual language has been proven time and again as one of the most important factors in clean and usable UI design. For example, if you want to have consistency in the Android ProgressBar, here’s a tip on that from Stack Overflow.
#GOTW ‐ Gem of the Week
We simply can’t believe we haven’t thought to feature motion-http in this section before. After all, who doesn’t need a cross-platform http client for RubyMotion, right? Don’t worry, we’ve linked Andrew Havens project on GitHub. Thanks for this, Andrew.
#COMM ‐ Community
Lerping, you say? Well, game development’s dirty little secret is that there is some nasty math involved like, for example, lerping. Once again Amir Rajan points us in the direction of an excellent explainer which will really help.
Also, how often have you wished you could run modern Ruby code in either older versions or alternative implementations? You can stop wishing because now you can, with Vladimir Dementyev’s ruby-next.
#AHTW ‐ App Highlight This Week
Because nobody has nominated a candidate (again!) we’re going to use this spot this week to let you know we’ve renamed this section to App Highlight This Week (#AHTW). To our horror we discovered the previous name had an unfortunate overlap with some—ahem—unrelated material.
#TWIL ‐ This Week I Learned
Although this has actually has been around since the beginning of this year, it’s not too late to mention Matthew Lang’s excellent Commonmarks. It’s your own private bookmarking app.
#HAHA ‐ And They All Laughed…
What sometimes makes a joke funny is when it observes a broader truth where we can say “yeah, that’s exactly right, isn’t it?” That’s certainly the case in the third instalment of our chicken ‘n pig series from Agile Safari and Jake Calabrese.
That’s a Wrap!
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Until next week…