Lori M Olson FITS — Featured in the School
All the FONTS, one of our RubyMotion lessons in the Motion In Motion subscription archive is — for a brief time — available as a free preview! Get in on it while you can! If you enjoy it and learn something useful — we’re confident you will — you’ll also really love the rest of the Volume 1 archive, available for purchase here.
TALK — Talk of the Tech
As we have mentioned a number of times in the past, there are two places you can and will want to hang out for group chat goodness related to RubyMotion and DRGTK: on the Discord channel recently, there was news about DRGTK 5.7 (and 5.8) Releases. Over on the Slack channel (AKA the Motioneers), you will find this really long thread about support for Sonoma (👍🏻) and iOS 17 (👎🏻).
GAME — All Things Gaming
We’re pretty sure Flappy Bird has been implemented on just about every development platform imaginable. However, we’re also pretty sure this is the first time it has been implemented on MacOS Finder. This programming triumph — Flappy Dird — is from eieio.games.
We hate to think what a version implemented on TIC-80, TOSHI, Torque3D or Turbulenz might be called.
APP — All Things App
As you likely have gathered from our previous snide comments with regard to AI, we’re skeptical. Why, you ask? Let us count the ways. Actually, never mind as that’s a pit of vipers 🐍 nobody wants to visit.
Anywho … via a recent tweet (or whatever you call tweets these days) we did find a great way for AI to help document your projects: while this an AI plugin to specifically help with Rails projects, we think it’s a great example of a better way forward for AI for software development in general. It can help with some of the time consuming, difficult tasks — like becoming familiar with a large codebase, for example.
So, if we think about AI as something to help and improve our lives — instead of a stealer of code or developer replacement — what would you like AI to do for you? Maybe the above? Something else we haven’t yet considered? Let us know!
TWIL — This Week [We] Learned …
“You can check-out any time you like … but you can never leave!” Not the Hotel California in this case, but rather Mac Catalyst as described in this recent article entitled Considering Mac Catalyst? A Word of Caution … from iOS Dev Weekly.
SPOT — Spotlight On …
Another thing we have harped on a lot in the past is the value of the university-level math and physics some of us never managed to pass. Vector math is at the very foundation of video game mechanics and we really wish we understood it better. Barring that, there is [ruby_vectormath](https://github.com/xenobrain/ruby_vectormath?utm_source=dragonrubydispatch.com) to which we were alerted by a discussion on the Discord which is also worthy of your attention — not that any of us has any to spare according to David Pogue.
HAHA — And They All Laughed
And we thought it was only us who couldn’t figure out what all those backslashes were doing.
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“Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.” — Neil Postman, co-author of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.