Issue 139

Lori M Olson Lori M Olson Follow Sep 06, 2023 · 5 mins read
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DRD139:Find a good tool and use it, or risk being one.
![](https://dragonrubydispatch.com/assets/images/devin-berko-workshop-800x600.png)
Brown Wooden Table With Chairs by Devin Berko via Unsplash.

OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion

The Other Tools You Need

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:

  1. Web page/site
  2. App prototyping tool
  3. Design tool
  4. Email marketing service
  5. 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.

Tool Investigations — The Series

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?

Do you have a DragonRuby-related product or service you would like to get in front of well over 1,200 raving DragonRuby-istas? 🐉 If so, please get in touch ... we would love to help you get the word out in a sponsored spot like this!  Sponsored

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.

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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

(credit: [Work Chronicles](https://workchronicles.com?utm_source=dragonrubydispatch.com))
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“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan