Lori M Olson OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
I found this on Twitter last week and I truly think that these 15 visuals can be specifically applied to many situations, and not just to life in general. For instance…when creating apps.
1) Before you start your app project it always looks overwhelming; when you actually get working on it, it feels a lot like hard work; after you’ve been doing it for a while it actually starts to be fun.
2) This one is a good reminder that starting and failing with your app project a couple of times doesn’t make you a failure; most people who are successful app creators have a lot of failures under their belt, that helped them to earn those successes.
4) It is so true that you don’t need more time to work on your projects; you need more focus.
6) and 7) And finally, discipline and consistency will get you a lot farther over time, than just talent alone will.
Anyway go ahead and look at the rest of the 15 different visuals and see how many of them can apply to you and your career or your app project. I really think most of them do.
FITS — Featured in the School
A few months ago, someone I know quoted this Quora answer to the question “Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?” and it really made me laugh. And cry a little.
The painful fact of software development is that we spend far too much of our time creating new things, and using new tools and libraries, and solving new problems. This leads us into the territory of not just the unknown, but the infinitely more scary unknown unknown. We don’t just not know. We don’t know what we don’t know.
And this is why I founded the WNDX School. From the basic (free) Getting Started with RubyMotion, to the RubyMotion Jumpstart, to the Motion In Motion Complete Collection, we have you covered for all your RubyMotion app development basics, so you can just worry about solving your particular problem.
TALK — Talk of the Tech
Regular DRD readers will forgive us if we provide this regular reminder that, in this section, we feature one item from each of the two main chat spaces for DragonRuby developers:
- Discord — In the last issue we marvelled at the realistic [modelling of torn fabric](https://twitter.com/marcheiligers/status/1533605958982639616) which seemed to be based on some pretty authentic physics. Well lo and behold, there is actually a [whole channel](https://discord.com/channels/608064116111966245/811105811505217566/974926017762308116) dedicated to math and physics, self-described as “questions about how to use [DRGTK] related to simulating physics, collisions, math, or any of that kind of stuff.”</em> Cool.
-
Slack — And over on Slack, there is a robust thread building on problems with
[rake device](https://motioneers.slack.com/archives/C055RS0VA/p1649279516159419).
The good news? There is absolutely no cost for participating in either and/or both.
GAME — All Things Gaming
It’s been a while since we mentioned our good friend Amir Rajan—the éminence grise of the RubyMotion/DragonRuby world—but clearly he has been very busy. His Return of Serenity just dropped on the App Store. It’s described as “a visual novel of sorts [and a] bite-size interactive story” We’d pay a few bucks just to find out what that means, exactly.
APP — All Things App
Working without a nib file: recently, it’s become apparent that at least some iOS developers are interested in creating UI’s without using Xcode’s visual builder. This is good for the RubyMotion community, since we mostly do that by default! Here are more examples built with ‘layouts in code’.
Oh, and just in case you needed yet another reason to spend your money on Amazon Web Services, they just gave you another one. You can now select an EC2 instance that’s a Mac Mini M1 to help build and test macOS, iOS, ipadOS, tvOS and watchOS apps. That said, it would have been nice if they had announced that before you went out and bought one for expressly that purpose.
SPOT — Spotlight On…
You never have to go too far to find yet another take on the the beloved classic Tetris video game. Ever thought of building your own version? Now you can with the help of this multi-part tutorial video which kicked off recently.
Speaking of physics (see above), we have a little more of that for you with soft body simulation which has been implemented in DRGTK, with many thanks to Amir for his efforts in this regard.
TWIL — This Week I Learned…
Hey, who knew? We didn’t. There’s an online SNES Text Box Generator made available by the good folks over at Creepy Assassin Games. 😱
HAHA — And They All Laughed
From A.B: “When your code finally works, but you have no idea how.”
The World’s Best DragonRuby Newsletter can be delivered to you—at least it will be if you subscribe! Follow the WNDX School on Facebook, and don’t forget to follow WNDXLori on Twitter and Instagram.
If you enjoyed this issue of the DragonRuby Dispatch, please forward to a friend and ask them to subscribe, too…we really appreciate it!
“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” — Michael Jordan