Lori M Olson OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
I received an email about Apple Entrepreneur Camp, but it was pretty thin on details. The important stuff isn’t listed until you get to the actual application page. Worldwide applicants are accepted and should be from underrepresented groups or specifically female founders. This is a great opportunity to get world-class support for your app idea. But you need to have a unique concept and at least a basic wireframe design.
So what are y’all waiting for? This is your engraved invitation!
FITS — Featured in the School
At least sort of — this is the last issue for the newsletter in its current form. We are making some changes:
The newsletter is being split into two parts. Truth is, it’s always had two parts: DragonRuby Dispatch and Tales from the Dragon. To date, they have been delivered in one email. Now they will be delivered separately on alternating weeks.
The first edition of Tales from the Dragon will be delivered next week. The DragonRuby Dispatch will carry on with issue 141 the week after that. Yes that’s right, you’ll be seeing an email from us every week, instead of every other week. 🤷♀️
The reason for this change is that there are two separate, but related, groups of people reading this newsletter now. Some of you are developers of apps and games. Some of you are business owners and entrepreneurs who want apps and games developed for you. Some of you might identify as both, of course. Here’s what you can expect from each:
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DragonRuby Dispatch will continue to bring you all the fun RubyMotion and DragonRuby news related to app and game development: Talk of the Tech, Spotlight On …, All Things App, All Things Gaming and This Week (We) Learned categories. Oh, and don’t forget the jokes!
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Tales from the Dragon will carry on with Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion and highlights of things from the world of mobile apps that are less technical in nature but still vital to the creation and launch of successful apps. These opinions will probably be fleshed out a bit more. And a couple of jokes might slip in there too. 😉
If it turns out that you don’t want both parts of the newsletter, we want to make it simple for you — there will always be a link to cancel just that part in addition to the global unsubscribe that each newsletter always contains. But we hope most of you decide to keep reading both parts, if you enjoy them!
That’s it — not really a big change, but we didn’t want to spring it on you next week when the new format actually begin to kick in.
TALK — Talk of the Tech
Here are our picks from recent theads in the two main RubyMotion and DRGTK chat spaces:
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Discord — If you’re about to unleash all that ballyhooed AI power on a sensible, coherent colour palette for your project, turns out there is a much simpler way of doing it. In fact it can all be distilled down into one line of code (at least conceptually) which is the subject of this recent discussion.
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Slack — There was a report of a rather nasty looking seg fault error recently. As is almost always the case, Amir was able to jump on it right away with a fix which is incorporated in the the recent release of RubyMotion 9.0 which, by the way, is just out. This is the version which supports the just-released-this-week iOS 17.
It’s a great idea to give one or both of these communities a try — they’re absolutely free and they will be very welcoming, without a doubt.
GAME — All Things Gaming
Speaking of what can be accomplished with one line of code, how about an old school maze generator as was found in the original user manual of the Commodore 64. Oh, yes, and in case you’re wondering what the hell that is (and you’re dating yourself if you are) check out the classic Honest Competition commercial from 1983. Click the GIF to see the full, 30 second version. It kind of explains why there may be old computer companies, and there may be bold computer companies, but there aren’t any old, bold computer companies.
SPOT — Spotlight On …
A couple of short snappers this issue:
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If you’ve been looking for “a small library that writes json from the base ruby values” you’re in luck, because that’s exactly what dragonjson does, according to its author. Also, if you’re looking to quickly come up to speed on the project, there’s a whole Discord channel — #oss-dragonjson — dedicated to its rumination.
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Also, keen to see what Amir has been working on lately? He described it as “bomb mechanics and enemies are coming together” which to our ear, sounds like something right out of a Neal Stephenson novel. And looks like it, too.
APP — All Things App
Ever thought it would be nice if you could create a single widget that was available everywhere (desktop, phone, TV and watch, for example) that shared a single resource like a data source? Alan Francis has and he has just embarked on a two part (so far?) series of articles entitled Once and Only Once on how to tackle that for the Apple ecosystem.
However, reading through what he has accomplished, we’re thinking something like this needs to be created for RubyMotion. Anybody out there with the time and ambition to take it on?
TWIL — This Week [We] Learned …
Not everyone knows how to exit Vim, the “ubiquitous text editor”. Sadly, it’s pretty much the only thing we do know about Vim. What brought this old chestnut back to top-of-mind was the truly hilarious pop-up message that not only covers off whether you know Vim, or not, but then goes on to test that knowledge. 🤓 Thanks to Bram Dingelstad for this one.
We see this is a whole new trend: perhaps the other ubiquitous thing we see — the cookie question — should be followed up with some dialogue along the lines of “do you even know what a cookie is?’ along with a short quiz on the subject.
HAHA — And They All Laughed
If you know, you know …
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“When we’re talking about diversity, it’s not a box to check. It is a reality that should be deeply felt and held and valued by all of us.” — Ava DuVernay