Lori M Olson OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
I haven’t talked about this much but my husband and I are renovating our house. Again. Demolition starts in less than two weeks. Last time it was the bedroom level of our four level split house. This time it’s the main level. This level contains the living room, dining room, kitchen, and the main entry to the house. The number of decisions and choices about colours and tiles and wood and cabinets and flooring and layout is endless. One of the things that currently stumping me is the tile for the front entry. As many people do today, I found an example of tile on Pinterest that I wanted to use for this area. Of course, when I showed this to all the tile store staff, everyone rolls their eyes and says that’s so last decade, and we can’t get that stuff anymore.
However, one tile store is working with us, trying to figure out how to re-create this tile style with the materials currently available to us. But now I need to find a pattern for the tiles and I need to visualize what the various colours of tiles that are currently available will look like in that pattern. You’d think with all the different kinds of apps available, I could find something like this in the App Store. A basic version of this wouldn’t even be very difficult to create. And if you wanted to make it really special, let people create their tile pattern using images of currently available tiles, lay it all out, and then use AR (augmented reality) to show them what it would look like on their floor. Now that would be amazing. But, sadly, there are no such apps. I’ll have to cobble things together with the images and photos and pdf’s that I have.
Just another example of “there are so many apps yet to be built!”
FITS — Featured in the School
I hope that some of you are even half as excited as I am about this news from the WNDX School. I’m working with a new course author to produce content for the WNDX School, starting with a new DragonRuby course!
If you have even thought about becoming a course creator, and want to create RubyMotion or DragonRuby content, just hit reply and let me know, and we can talk about it.
TALK — Talk of the Tech
- Slack — Have you been part of the [Great Resignation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation), and finally realized that while you may have ‘found yourself’, you've also found yourself running out of money. If it's time to get back to work, you're in luck: Shawn Van Ittersum (founder of [AppJudo](https://www.appjudo.com)) is looking for a [RubyMotion developer](https://motioneers.slack.com/archives/C055RDLS0/p1657329940768769).
- Discord — A [NES](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System) emulator written in DragonRuby? Actually, one exists already—sort of. [OptCarrot](https://github.com/mame/optcarrot) is a NES emulator written in Ruby, but it runs in slow-motion—20fps as opposed NES's usual 60fps. It begat [Carrot](https://github.com/awfulcooking/Carrot), which is a port of OptCarrot to DR. As discussed recently on the Discord, another element just fell into place recently: a [sprite sheet extractor](https://discord.com/channels/608064116111966245/674410581326823446/993499733744164994).
SPOT — Spotlight On…
So what with the recent talk of sprite sheets on Discord (see above) it’s still perfectly okay for you to say “sure, but how do you actually use them in real life?” Fortunately, there is a recent blog post from Justin Collins on that very subject: Basic Sprite Animation.
TWIL — This Week I Learned…
Quite often, when a set of facts is visualized in a novel new way, it results in an entirely new perception of the subject to which they relate. Here’s a great example from Visual Capitalist which presents a new way of thinking about the make-up of the surface of the Earth. Thanks to Massimo for bringing this to our attention.
GAME — All Things Gaming
In a recent issue of DRD, we reported on the Boss Battle game jam, and we’re delighted to feature another outstanding entrant. This one has kind of a ‘Hamilton meets alien invaders’s theme which, if nothing else, makes it unique. We think. In any event check out Duelists.
APP — All Things App
It seems like all sorts of mainstream services are adding text-to-speech capability—the blogging site Medium is one of the latest, for example. That’s useful both for the visually impaired as well as those who have gotten way too used to podcasts as a substitute for—y’know—reading. Regardless, if you’re ready to jump on that bandwagon, there’s espeak-ruby, which is a wrapper for the existing, mature espeak and lame libraries.
HAHA — And They All Laughed
“The problem with ‘logic’ is that it makes things out to be nothing but simple dualities. Proponents of logic want us to believe that everything is true or false, black or white, yes or no, paper or plastic, etc. Thankfully, there are some among us…who are not afraid to stand up to these logic advocates and shout ‘no, I will not succumb to your false dichotomies!’ Today, I think we all should salute those few brave people…” — Alex Papadimoulis Founder, The Daily WTF
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“No idea is original, there’s nothing new under the sun, it’s never what you do, but how it’s done.” — Nas<div style="font-size: 6pt; float: right; margin-left: 83%;">
(credit: Coup d’Oreille via Wikimedia under CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped.)</div>