Issue 133 |

“Brown and Black Fishing Rod” by Matthew McBrayer on Unsplash.

OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion

Gone Fishin’

Our fearless leader Lori is taking a hard-earned and well-deserved break this issue. She will return with more of her usual pithy prose in a couple of weeks’ time. Meanwhile, she has left the inmates running the asylum …

FITS — Featured in the School

Free Webinar: App Prototyping

Coming off a successful presentation of our brand new App Prototyping webinar as part of the Rural Women Entrepreneurs In Tech program, Lori will be hosting a repeat of this free webinar—and it’s open to the public! It runs on July 10th, 12.00 (noon) Mountain Daylight Time (18.00 UTC).

This webinar is intended to help diverse entrepreneurs explore their ideas for apps and learn how to create an app prototype using free tools.

Sign up today. Attendance is limited so make sure you do it soon!

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TALK — Talk of the Tech

Here are this issue’s selections from two of the finer RubyMotion/DRGTK chat spaces:

</a>Slack — Motioneer ‘Yasu’ recently posed a question as to whether the Core Audio Data Types would eventually be available on RubyMotion. What followed is an instructive discussion which included no less an authority than Amir Rajan himself.
Discord — If you have ever felt the need to “peek right into your game state” then you’ll want to check out Palantir from our friend Kevin Fischer. It’s a “live game state inspector for DragonRuby” that requires no code changes. We were twigged to this by a recent discussion on Discord.

You will find participating in either and/or both of these two forums is a real benefit at a very affordable price—that is, absolutely free.

GAME — All Things Gaming

We are pretty sure we have previously mentioned the new Playdate handheld game system which is currently taking pre-orders for “late 2023” delivery. Looks pretty cool—particularly the little hand crank on the right-hand side.

In any event, they’re busy ‘cranking out’ games for it that they’ll deliver automatically via wifi ‘while you sleep’. That said, we’re not sure in a collaboration which includes companies called Panic and Teenage Engineering there will be a whole lot of sleeping going on.

In case you’re wondering why we’re bringing this up now, our memories were recently jogged by this toot 💨 from Mike Piontek.

APP — All Things App

Speaking of sleepless, angst-filled nights check out Memory Spy from Julia Evans. It enables you to “spy on a program’s memory”. Don’t worry, it’s nowhere near as ‘1984’ as it sounds. Julia explains all in an informative blog post.

SPOT — Spotlight On …

We’re constantly in awe of what the DragonRuby community routinely produces. Here are just a couple of examples:

If you have ever contemplated learning Japanese and have typed how do I learn Japanese? into your favourite search engine, there's a pretty good chance one of the resources to which you've been pointed is Flashkana. It's an Android ‘flashcard’ app to test your knowledge of [hiragana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana) and [katakana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana) characters. Well, now there's a [reasonable facsimile of it](https://valeureux.itch.io/flashkana) on itch.io for your edification. どういたしまして
A little less highbrow—but probably more fun!—is this cute little game called A Foxy Eggventure. Probably all the bait you need is the names of the two principal characters: Finn, the eponymous and alliterative fox and Gregg—as in Gregg the Egg. No relation to Cousin Greg. This was an entrant in the recently concluded [KIFASS](https://itch.io/jam/kifass)^† game jam. Go ahead, we dare you to [resist giving it a try](https://dishcandanty.itch.io/a-foxy-eggventure?utm_source=new.rcsoaringdigest.com).

^†Keep It Fun and Stupid, Stupid!

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TWIL — This Week I Learned …

There seems to be no limit to what is lurking in the lowly command line. This time ‘round we learned it can be used to determine battery level. Kind of handy for processes that—if kiboshed by a dead battery—would willingly conspire to ruin your whole day.

HAHA — And They All Laughed

So that’s what task decomposition is for …

(credit: Programmer Jokes on Telegram)

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“Fishing seems to be the great occasion when all manner of contradictions reconcile themselves.” — Iris Murdoch