Lori M Olson OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
This past weekend my husband and I attended a large extended family gathering for a 50th wedding anniversary. At times they were over 80 people present, most of us camping at the community centre where the celebration was being held.
Lots of people, lots of conversations. And because I just can’t help myself I always hear the conversations where people are talking about apps. There were two conversations in particular I want to discuss:
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One group was talking about the proliferation of rental scooters in the nearby city. One particular man, about my age, said, “I’d like to try out those scooters, but I’m afraid of the app.” 🤦🏻♀️
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The second group was talking about rural security, and what each of them were doing, in order to feel safe. One lady, a bit older than me, said they had [large telco] security. Then she laughed and said they never use it, because they’d forgotten the passcode, and we’re afraid what’d happen if they used the wrong code. 🤦🏻♀️
These are two very different apps, and yet they have similar problems. Problems that actually prevent people from using the product or service.
If they were my responsibility, I’d ensure the scooter rental app had a super-friendly on-boarding video, something that could easily be accessed by a new or infrequent user. And I’d make sure the security app had an obvious way to deal with forgotten passcodes.
Don’t make your apps hard to use. Make on-boarding easy and ensure that common fail cases are easily handled.
FITS — Featured in the School
We are very pleased to have been receiving beta feedback on our new DragonRuby GTK Building Blocks series. If you are one of the beta testers and have not yet submitted your feedback, we’d appreciate that feedback as soon as possible so we can get this published!
APP — All Things App
We have been around long enough to have used so many fancy fonts we now finding ourselves landing on trusty ol’ Tahoma or Times New Roman quite often. All the doodads font designers add just seem to look the same after a while and just add visual clutter.
Which is why were so intrigued with a new font which is on quite a different mission—doodad-free and for a very good reason. Intel One Mono is designed for “developers who have low vision, with the goal of making programming more accessible by making it easier to read and write code”. It’s about time and what a great idea!
What’s more you can download it for free from the Intel (yes, that Intel) GitHub site.
TALK — Talk of the Tech
Here are our two picks from the two main RubyMotion/DRGTK chat spaces:
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Discord — Here’s a fascinating thread which illustrates the vital importance of getting feedback before you release your app or game. We know … you want to get it just right before releasing it into the wild. We get it. However you may just find the thing you figure users won’t be able to live without is hardly noticed while some vital feature goes totally unaddressed. You just never know ‘til you ask!
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Slack — You have to hand it to Amir, he’s always on top of updates. Case in point, RubyMotion 8.17 has been released. In particular
replhas been fixed and universal arch for BridgeSupport generation has been added.
It’s a great idea to give one or both of these a try—they’re absolutely free.
TWIL — This Week I Learned …
It is the height of summer 🥵 here in the Northern Hemisphere so you can hopefully forgive us if we idle away some time on subjects which would be great candidates for questions in Tech Jeopardy. If only there was such a show on TV. In the category You’re Blocked! they would display the various Tetris blocks and ask you to name them. Because, yes, they all have names. 😱 Hopefully you hit the Daily Double because you now know which ones are Orange Ricky and Smashboy.
GAME — All Things Gaming
Okay, we’ll admit to be total suckers for that new (at least to us 🤓) Instagram feature where you can add soundtrack music to a post. Not just generic ‘filler’ but actual licensed tracks from names-you’ll-recognise artists. There’s just something about the ability of music to trigger and shape a stronger emotional response to an image.
So it comes as absolutely no surprise that the recent article How Music Shapes the Way We Play Video Games by Kellen Beck describes the phenomenon in more detail. We guess we always kind of knew that, intuitively, but it’s great to have the validation of some well thought out prose on the subject.
SPOT — Spotlight On …
Back on the Discord, Amir recently pointed out that one of his team members recently gave a talk at 2023 EuroLLVM. Alex Denisov presented on the subject of Firestorm. Well worth a look. Or at the very least a flip through the slides.
HAHA — And They All Laughed
It’s one of those ‘why the heck didn’t we think of that so we could put it on a t-shirt’ moments:
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“The dogs you see out surfing can’t wait to get on their boards and go running into the water with their humans—for the fun of it.” — Jessica Gercke