Rhomobile - crossplatform smartphone dev - anyone tried this?

If you use it for a for-profit program you have to give the company a % of sales. I would rather suffer through Objective-C.

I think they will be driven out of business by HTML5 after some time. WebKit is already on Android, iPhone and Palm Pre. It's only a matter of time before Blackberry and Nokia succumb too - they need a web browser and they can't afford to create their own. Microsoft is the only one that is questionable here.

So I say if you want to see the future of cross-platofrm mobile development take a look at HTML5 and the WebKit (the latest and greatest is in iPhone OS 3.0) The javascript speed is improving rapidly, CSS animations are built-in and you can store both code and data locally. No PIM access yet, but if that gets solved then that's the end of the road for form-based native apps and maybe even some of the simple games (and until then there is PhoneGap).

The concept itself is really a great selling point: you develop one mobile app in ruby and it works across on blackberry, iphone, symbian, android etc. Plus they have a sync server to keep data current on the device.

From my experience building a small app on it, it works great if your building an extension to an enterprise/business app. For something like Salesforce where its mostly just a glorified excel table + CRUD, it fits perfectly.

Wikipedia recently switched to it from Objective-C.

If your doing something particularity complicated it might not be the best option - yet. Although, they do have GPS, PIM and camera support that can be accessed via ruby.

The good thing is that its open source so you can hack the source if you know java/ruby.

I was at demo these guys did for a SV Rails Meetup, and while the basic functionality is pretty damn cool, I have some concerns about the base footprint of applications.

The baseline they quoted was 2MB, which may not be much when you're talking about a desktop app downloaded over cable or DSL, but in the mobile space, where (non-iPhone) devices may only ship with 50-100MB of storage free, and many users are served mostly by poky EDGE networks, a multi-MB "hello, world!" seems a bit excessive.

That being said, for their core market -- namely, developers porting enterprise app UIs to mobile devices -- I think it could be an acceptable tradeoff for the productivity gain that results from it being "just another browser app".

I saw this for the first time today as well - never heard of it before. Looking forward to playing with it later this weekend.

When it comes to % of sales: as a developer on Windows/Linux machines I don't have any other choice, do I? At least when it comes to iPhone development.