RubyMotion resources

While development may be moving mobile RubyMotion is actually moving somewhat desktop-bound: latest builds support OS X desktop app building. It's a lovely replacement for MacRuby, which isn't building post-LLVM.

Meanwhile, more along mobile lines, RubyMotion has promised Android support. iOS templated apps will be able to share classes etc. with Android templated apps. Pretty exciting stuff for native.

The cost of a RubyMotion license has to me seemed a little steep when piled atop the other OS X fees, but taken in context and with derived value (for me, namely staying in vim and out of XCode and Eclipse) I think the price makes on the whole.

One thing about RubyMotion that to me is a kind of massive failure is that while I love Ruby a lot, when learning iOS, the IDE is massively helpful.

Objective-C is verbose and maybe terrible, but code completion, type checking, etc. is really useful, especially when you are learning the API's.

My experience playing with RubyMotion was that I would end up reading the docs constantly to learn how to do things in Objective-C and then translate those ideas to Ruby.

Now that Swift exists the argument for Ruby on iOS is a bit weaker. I like that RubyMotion is supporting Android soon and that will help a ton, but I think for most devs, just learning Swift and getting good with the native tools will be better in the long run than deep diving on RubyMotion.

That being said, I hope RubyMotion continues to do well. Choice is good and for some people, I'm sure RubyMotion is the best thing since sliced bread.

TLDR: "We just started using this thing. It's pretty cool, but we're not going to tell you anything other than you should use it. Here's some DSLs for it."