Get Started Writing iOS Apps With RubyMotion | Hacker News Reader

Get Started Writing iOS Apps With RubyMotion

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41 pointsjballanc15 comments

I doubt RubyMotion is going to gain any ground until they have a free development/evaluation version. $200 up-front for a license is too spendy for many people just curious to try something out. If there was a free dev/eval version, I'm sure many more licenses of RubyMotion would be sold.

Agree, i'm dying to have a play with this but I begrudge paying 200 bucks before I even know if I like it! Maybe they should allow you to develop your entire app for free but put some sort of kill switch inside which makes it fail to pass app store validation or w/e.

I think you should see it as an early adopter fee. I bet if more people use RubyMotion, Laurent is going to drop the price.

I bought RubyMotion short after the release and i can say it's really worth the price. If you love Ruby and you love iOS, buy a licence.

Biggest issue with this is the lag time between iOS SDK releases and whenever they update their SDK. Overall interesting, but not something I'd seriously consider writing an app with, knowing Objective-C already. This is more for Rubyists who'd like to dip their toes into the iOS ecosphere, but go in knowing that it's always better to just learn ObjC eventually.

RubyMotion's updated very often (at least weekly) and supported the first iOS6 beta within a day of its release. That expedience could change in the future, but I don't see it being something to worry about.

I also like to mention http://rubymotion-tutorials.com/ on this topic. :)

Another really great resource. It's really encouraging to see the nascent community that's grown up around RubyMotion!

Shameless self-plug but I'm working on a repo that's attempting to documents 1:1 how to use the iOS SDK from RubyMotion without trying to abstract it away into a library. Libraries will change and evolve or worse, be leaky abstractions, but the SDK is a slower moving target you can always fall back to: http://iconoclastlabs.github.com/rubymotion_cookbook/

We'd love to have more eyes on it, it's just something we do in our spare time, so it's a bit slow going. We've also hit a few rough spots where our obvious lack of iOS knowledge has slowed us down (CoreData, I'm looking at you). We've uncovered some RubyMotion bugs in the process, so I feel it's a valuable project that reaches into all the seldom used dark corners of the SDK and verifies that they work.

Awesome! I added it to Rubymotion-Tutorials.com http://rubymotion-tutorials.com/links/24

OT: It really confuses me what it takes for someone to have all their new comments marked as 'dead', kenrikm seems to have a perfectly reasonable submission and comment history with the exception of the last submission which was marked as 'dead'...

What I'm personally interested in is how well can you write pure ObjC apps while using RubyMotion's build and test infrastructure. I've spent some time searching, but I haven't been able to find many people talking about or doing it, at odds with the real-world interest I've seen so far.

Has anyone spent time using RubyMotion to simplify writing ObjC apps?

I don't know ruby and have learned Objective-C so this makes me unfairly unhappy. It's actually pretty cool.

Just wait till you start using it :)

This reads exactly like the Objective-C tutorial would, with an analogue syntax, manual instantiation of views (as compared to IB), and a different set of command-line-only tools.

What's the catch or is there anything that is obviously not possible to do in rubymotion ?

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