Lori M Olson FITS — Featured in the School
One of the recent changes at Teachable — the education platform that wndx.school is on — is the ability to ‘gift’ a course. While it is not yet possible to actually schedule a gift course (get cracking on that Teachable!), but if you would like to gift someone a course (they can book themselves), you can! ↖️
For example, may we suggest Programming Fundamentals with Ruby for the complete programming novice? This is our absolute beginners guide to programming, using the Ruby language. Alternatively, how about RubyMotion Testing In Depth for the more seasoned programmer?
TALK — Talk of the Tech
We found this interesting toot 💨 about how hard it is to search for help when you are a newbie — you don’t likely have the necessary vocabulary to even get started finding the things you need to learn. Which made us think this might make a useful documentation contribution to the DragonRuby docs. And don’t forget there’s a whole Discord channel for how to make such contributions!
Have you been seeing the dreaded requested deployment target SDK is not available or supported by RubyMotion at this time? You’re in luck: here’s what to do when you encounter this using the free version of RubyMotion.
SPOT — Spotlight On …
There’s a lot of time and energy expended hiding complexity to make an app (appear) simple. But we all know there’s a ton of complexity behind the scenes and there are times we want to know what all that is. So, filed under the category of Things We Didn’t Know We Needed is Apparency from Mothers Ruin Software. A simple, interesting and not-to-mention useful app which opens apps to see the smoke-belching sausage factory lurking behind that shiny, innocent-looking exterior.
Also, a while back, we believe we featured a product of Akzidenz’s fertile imagination: This game is TOO EASY. It didn’t take a degree in rocket surgery to guess there was going to be a sequel: This game is TOO HARD. We tried it and it is. But then again we’re not the sharpest tools in the shed.
GAME — All Things Gaming
Game development powerhouse Rovio — yes, the Angry Birds Rovio — recently launched the Playbook for Inclusive Game Development and Marketing as described in this recent VentureBeat article. This is long overdue and kudos to them for advancing this important work.
APP — All Things App
Short notice event alert! Coming up on the 15th of this month is Hacking on Ruby Prism. This is a great (and free) opportunity to learn more about how Ruby parsing actually works.
TWIL — This Week [We] Learned …
This LinkedIn article on 3D-printed ‘business cards’ based on Near Field Communications technology (NFC) caught our attention. Briefly stated, NFC enables the sharing of small data payloads over a very short distance — four centimetres or less.
While that’s pretty cool all on its own, we’re wondering if the aforementioned fertile imaginations of our readers might adapt the concept to the game/app context. What are your thoughts and, by all means, please let us know what ideas you have along these lines!
HAHA — And They All Laughed
So you just quit that secure, near-seven-figure-income job with its blue ribbon 401K and other lavish benefits so you can finally pursue your dream of being an indie game developer? Here’s a short video which foreshadows what lies ahead. 😱
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“It’s Christmas Eve! It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be.” — Bill Murray, as Frank Cross in 1988’s Scrooged.