Lori M Olson OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
There’s a surprising number of not-strictly-development-related technologies needed in order to create and launch a successful app. These tools include, in no particular order:
- Web page/site
- App prototyping tool
- Design tool
- Email marketing service
- App testing tool
This is not an exhaustive list, either. This surprises and sometimes shocks the people I teach in 6 Pack Apps. While you might be able to squeak through the process by avoiding a couple of them, your launch will be much simpler, happen faster and be less prone to “oops, didn’t know I needed that” if you just surrender to the necessity up front.
This is the reason for my current series of ‘webinar-like’ working sessions. I’m demonstrating the use of tools, using them to create both an app and the assets needed to actually get launched! See immediately below for more info.
FITS — Featured in the School
Since Lori’s last couple of free webinar/sessions have been pretty popular, she’s going to continue the series with the hope of doing them once a month. If you’d like to be on the list to be informed when these sessions are happening, click the link below. You’ll get a heads up email the day before and another in the hour before we get started, which includes the link to join. The next in our series is a followup to the previous ((No Code Investigations). Click here to get on the list for No Code — Can You Build and App in an Hour?
TALK — Talk of the Tech
Here is our pick from one of the two main RubyMotion/DRGTK chat spaces:
- Discord — Amir Rajan and the gang have been busy — as usual! — and they just rolled out DRGTK 5.6. Be the first kid on the block to have it!
It’s a great idea to give one or both of these high-IQ communities a try—they’re absolutely free and you’ll undoubtedly be welcomed with open arms.
TWIL — This Week I Learned …
Unless you have been under a rock 🪨 which is ten feet under water for the last few months, AI is everything, everywhere, all at once. While on the one hand ignorance is bliss — don’t ask us how we know — on the other you may be of the mind it’s time to get your feet at least damp, if not completely soaked with AI. Fortunately, there’s a really useful application which Elijah Major describes both succinctly and clearly in his new video AI for the Command-Line. But don’t stop there — Elijah has a lot of other neat videos on a wide variety of subjects.
GAME — All Things Gaming
We somehow missed this on International Womens’ Day, but why wait for a specific, arbitrary day on a calender to celebrate women in general and in particular share this awesome book: Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals at Play. Thanks very much to The Video Game Library on Mastodon for tipping us off to this one.
SPOT — Spotlight On …
It’s hard the deny the perennial appeal of Pong — or explain it, for that matter — but as time goes by it just seems to get bigger and get more attention. So forget previously-only-renderable-on-a-supercomputer graphics of Gran Turismo or Tour of Duty, gimme eight-bit graphics, that funky little bleeping sound and the weirdo, dodgy physics.
However, all that notwithstanding you can’t help but be swept up in Pong-mania, there’s a great, three-part tutorial on rolling your own with the DragonRuby Gaming Toolkit. Dodgy physics and all, hopefully.
APP — All Things App
We remember the first few stabs at consumer-grade voice control: yelling at our car repeatedly and progressively louder to turn on the radio — which resulted only in the windshield wipers coming on — is a memory we would just as soon forget.
However things have come a long way since then, as described in Building for Voice Control by Jordan Morgan where he leads off by claiming it “allows you to do … well, basically everything on your iPhone using only your voice”. Jordan, the floor is yours.
HAHA — And They All Laughed
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“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan