Lori M Olson 
OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
I’ve heard this a lot. I can’t create an app because I’m not a designer.
I’m calling bullshit.
I’d like you to go and look at a few of the most popular apps on your phone and then do a little Google search on what the first version of that app actually looked like. I can guarantee that 95% of those apps looked like ASS for their first version. And why is that? Because the developers were more focussed on HOW THE APP FUNCTIONED and not how it looked.
And that’s what you need to focus on for the first version of your app—functionality. So don’t tell me about how you aren’t a designer—just get out there and create your app.
FITS — Featured in the School
The Model-View-Controller pattern is likely familiar to most Rails developers. But did you know there are equivalents in RubyMotion development? In fact, The WNDX School has you covered for all three, with a course dedicated to each: Models are covered in Core Data In Motion; Views in RubyMotion Query In Depth and you can learn about Controllers in View Controllers in RubyMotion. Sign up for any and all today.
SPOT — Spotlight On…
Okay, okay we know…this is Python. What’s that doing in a DragonRuby newsletter? Well, it turns out it’s also a pretty good static code formatter for DragonRuby docs, all in a couple of gists: one for the readme (on the left) and one for the Python code itself as shown below on the right).
In the last issue of DragonRuby Dispatch, we brought you news of Blockly, a Lego-like (seriously) approach to putting together code. Absent a DragonRuby-specific version, the illustrative example to which we pointed readers was Blockly2Ruby.
Of course, it goes without saying that DragonBlocks was released mere minutes after hitting the publish key on the previous issue. In any event, take a look and see what you think. We like what we see!
TALK — Talk of the Tech
We haven’t mentioned this in a while so it bears repeating that Talk in this context is not just some loose metaphor, but rather a means of describing the two primary chat spaces available to DragonRuby-istas: the first is where you can find most of the game-related chat: Discord. For everything else, you can usually find some scintillating repartee in Slack. We try to feature an item from each, in each issue and we highly recommend you join both groups.
From Slack, this time ‘round, there is news of RubyMotion 7.20 being released. Over on Discord, word is Kevin Fischer has released Part 6 of his Roguelike tutorial.
GAME — All Things Gaming
Honestly, we are not trying to go out of our way to not feature DragonRuby code, but there’s another example that while not in DR, is still very cool particularly for those who prefer virtual reality rather than real reality: Doom VR. It’s also kinda cool that it’s from a local (as in Calgary, Alberta) developer: Red Iron Labs.
APP — All Things App
Anybody out there want to ‘ask not what the community can do for you, but what you can do for the community’? If so, here’s a great little project for you: adding support for UIImage’s new constructor, using system images, to BubbleWrap. Thanks to our friend Paul ‘Two Straws’ Hudson who gave us a heads up in a tweet from a while back.
TWIL — This Week I Learned…
OK, we’ll admit it. We haven’t closed a browser tab since the waning days of the Clinton administration. You just never know when you’re going to need them, right? Actually, it’s not that but rather we’re just too damned lazy to go through a jillion tabs and close them all. That was until Sommer Panage’s tweet where she mentions how to close every tab to the left (or right) of your current tab. It was no exaggeration when she said her “life shall never be the same”.
For our part, we say “what she said”.
HAHA — And They All Laughed
What’s Cassidy Williams doing when she’s not busy directing developer experience for Netlify? Making funny little videos: this one riffs on the apocryphal stat that two-out-of-three-developers don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
That’s a Wrap!
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“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry