8 ms·

RubyMotion Goes 2.0 And Gets OSX Support, Templates and Plugins

185 points by jballanc 13y ago

relix 13y ago
That's awesome. I recently tried to get into MacRuby development, but there's a serious dearth out there of resources (for the beginner), and I had to guess on how to do a lot of things. Hopefully the RubyMotion support will be better!
gnufied 13y ago
This is excellent news. I purchased RubyMotion when it came out and largely didn't use it for awhile. Since last 3 months our company which is entirely made of Rails/JS guys have been building small apps using RubyMotion. I didn't know they were working on OSX support. But this is huge for me, back on GNU/Linux GUI programming using dynamic languages is easy. py-gtk/ruby-gnome2 bindings really work well and It is incredibly awesome that you can build small utils for yourself in a afternoon using py-gtk/ruby-gnome2. Ability to do the same for OSX is exciting!
mattetti 13y ago
And here is how MacRuby developers were lied to and the RubyMotion project made the choice to not contribute back but instead to focus on keeping innovation proprietary. https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2012-April/008702.html https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2012-Ap... It's quite a sad day to think that Apple invested on MacRuby and kept it open source... and RubyMotion chose another route even for OS X dev.
- venus 13y ago
  Oh yes, what a horrid selfish man, trying to feed his family and make a business for himself. Not like generous, giving, open source-loving Apple! Give me a break. The guy's made something amazing. Good on him for charging for it, making a success of it, so much so that we now have a version 2.0. This would never have come from some lousy half-hearted Apple mailing list. I am happy to pay for this product, and I do not blame him for keeping it proprietary. I just don't see what your point is. It seems like you just want something for nothing and are dressing that up in some unlikely open-source clothes.
  - coherentpony 13y ago
    You have completely missed the point. Charging for software is not a crime. The point is that he lied to the open source community about his intentions.
    - plorkyeran 13y ago
      It has been over a year since that post. It is not at all implausible that the post accurately described his intentions at the time he wrote it.
    - venus 13y ago
      Your accusation that he deliberately lied, rather than simply changed his mind, has no foundation whatsoever.
      - acangiano 13y ago
        I can vouch for this. Laurent and I heavily discussed RubyMotion in its early days. His idea was to create a mobile solution (ergo Motion in the name) and had no intention whatsoever to include Mac OS X development at the time. It turns out however that the market wanted a unified toolchain. Many customers asked for it. And Laurent, like any good business person would, listened to the needs of his customers.
        mattetti 13y ago
        Antonio, but nothing prevented him to contribute back to MacRuby (OS X) the required changes to get rid of the GC and therefore to not rely on deprecated technology.
        carterschonwald 13y ago
        Tough shit. He's trying to support himself and his employees. Likewise, backporting their work to a even slightly different code base would require time they frankly don't have. Unless you have a time travel device you can give him, don't demand time he doesn't have. Laurent frankly is underpricing his wonderful tools, and has to support himself and all those folks he's hired. Time is finite, and no human can do all the things they'd like to do. Modifying RubyMotion to have the right hooks for the OS X apis etc is likely much simpler than fixing up MacRuby architecturally. Point being, people have finite time, they can't do all the things they want to. Either be nice or give him a time turning / time travel device
- colinta 13y ago
  If you don't like RubyMotion, then don't buy a license. Plain as that! Thanks Laurent, Shizuo, and the FANTASTIC RubyMotion community!
- alloy 13y ago
  [Disclaimer: MacRuby core member here.] I agree, it’s too bad that people can’t just work for free as much as they would like on the stuff they love. Now it is true that Laurent himself has not touched the repo since that email you linked to, but you know just as well as me that Watson has been doing maintenance work on MacRuby while on the payroll of RubyMotion (HipByte). His latest commit was 15 days ago and here’s a generalised diff of all the work done since the email: https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/compare/94c90b351c18ce1f59a3add8b525baf466e4dace...3f0dd69a4cc16a6fc7f7f00b6a1dc370d2fad80f https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/compare/94c90b351c18ce1f5.... This is what people with limited time resources do, they delegate. To conclude, when you’re out to paint someone black, you really should be more specific. As it stands, there are no lies in that email, which means that you are the one that is not telling the truth. I’m not sure why you want to spread FUD, but it’s quite obvious and really does not make you look professional. PS: Whatever Apple chose or chooses to do has absolutely no relevancy to this at all. The moment they released it as Open-Source, they effectively said that people can do what they want as long as they follow the license.
  - flyingbeaver 13y ago
    Well put.
  - mattetti 13y ago
    Alloy my point was not about maintenance but the fact that MacRuby relies on the ObjC GC which is now deprecated. In this email thread Laurent acknowledge the need to switch to static compilation and that he has a working branch he will soon merge. This is exactly what RubyMotion just released and I'm saddened that it was not contributed back as promised. It's as simple as that.
    - 1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
      I've been losing respect for HipByte. Laurent is making tough calls, I'll bide my time.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Well, spoking of broken promises and people abandoning things, didn't you write a book on MacRuby and a couple of articles touting it, and then abandoned the project for greener pastures (Ruby, Go and such)? What about the folks that bought into the book and MacRuby, thinking that it was a viable project, and then see you, one of the (few) main contributors abandon it -- and long before today's release of RubyMotion.
- hlidotbe 13y ago
  Apple invested in MacRuby? What a joke! This project was almost singlehandedly held by one person. I know for a fact that Apple doesn't give a fuck about MacRuby, don't fool yourself about that.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Who ask for this misinformed opinion? >Apple invested in MacRuby? What a joke! Yes, it did. Back in the day, MacRuby started by Apple employees and initial development was paid by Apple. >This project was almost singlehandedly held by one person. Which is beside the point. >I know for a fact that Apple doesn't give a fuck about MacRuby You don't say! That has been the case several years now, since Apple stopped supporting the project. Everybody in the MacRuby community knows this. >don't fool yourself about that. Thank you, Captain Informed.
- deedubaya 13y ago
  As someone who wrote a number of MacRuby apps, I find the support for OSX wonderful. MacRuby is slow and clunky. Fact. This is a big improvement performance wise. Do I mind paying for that improvement? Hell no. MacRuby development has pretty much halted once it lost Apple Support. I don't mind paying for something that will be maintained and improved upon.
- octopus 13y ago
  I wouldn't take this personally, it is just a smart business decision. It makes sense that once you buy a RubyMotion license to be able to use the same toolchain on OS X. Also, I wouldn't mind paying for RubyMotion as long as I'm assured the project will go forward. Unfortunately MacRuby lost momentum when Apple decided to not support the project anymore.
- stevoski 13y ago
  Lied? or changed his mind?
- thibaut_barrere 13y ago
  I find that it's a happy day, not a sad day (even if I like open-source). Why? Because now some of my customers are going to seriously think about using Ruby for Mac OS X apps, because they know someone is making profit while supporting this, so they feel they can rely on this. I much prefer this to the fate of IronRuby (or to some extent, MacRuby). Remember what you wrote one year ago [1] ? Using RubyMotion for a professional product represents a significant business risk, which is exactly the same as using proprietary technology from any vendor. It turns out the opposite is coming to reality :p [1] http://merbist.com/2012/05/04/macruby-on-ios-rubymotion-review/ http://merbist.com/2012/05/04/macruby-on-ios-rubymotion-revi...
coherentpony 13y ago
I'm not sure I understand this. Is RubyMotion just a set of wrappers around Objective-C classes to allow you to develop applications in Ruby? If so, why? Is the point to allow Rubyists that don't want to learn Objective-C to develop applications in Ruby?
- mikelbring 13y ago
  Thats part of it and you do not have to use Xcode. Some of the gems such as BubbleWrapper also created a really nice syntax.
- sbarre 13y ago
  That is exactly the point.
- zerr 13y ago
  Agree. Not language but API should be fixed.
  - colinta 13y ago
    Disagree. And that's why we have RubyMotion! :-)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - tamersalama 13y ago
    RubyMine IDE from IntelliJ [1] is a nice part of the tool-chain. It has auto-complete for RubyMotion. [1] http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/ http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/
    - film42 13y ago
      I was about to ask about this. RubyMotion seems amazing, but sometimes objective-c is about just opening that auto-complete and seeing what methods are at your disposal.
DigitalJack 13y ago
Can RubyMotion work with GNUStep?
- colinta 13y ago
  I doubt this has ever been tried, but I seriously doubt it... the compiler does a lot of work looking at the Cocoa frameworks to build the bridgesupport files. Are GNUStep frameworks built the same way?
cnp 13y ago
SO rad!
mamcx 13y ago
How I wish something like this exist for python..
- colinta 13y ago
  The closest thing I know about is Kivy.
- srik 13y ago
  PySide isn't half as bad as you might remember. And yes, kivy is pretty respectable and only getting better. They did win a little grant too recently.
chrisdevereux 13y ago
Anyone had experience incrementally adopting rubymotion in a larger objective-c project? The languages obviously match up pretty well, I'm thinking more about toolchains, etc. Would love to play with this but am fairly invested in a big obj-c thing right now.
- colinta 13y ago
  I haven't done a larger project, but I did port a small project by starting with just the AppDelegate. It was easier to first turn the xcode project/obj-c code into a library, and compile it as such. The classes "just worked", and with all the nibs in resources/ those loaded, too! I translated the models into Ruby, and pulled those out of the xcode lib. Eventually the entire codebase was converted (except the nibs).
pjmlp 13y ago
It would be nice to have it in other platforms, anyway it quite nice to have the option to natively compile Ruby code.
gfodor 13y ago
Beyond the OSX support the weakref support is very welcome!
- hboon 13y ago
  WeakRef still doesn't zero out collected references, so https://github.com/farcaller/motion-memorymanagement https://github.com/farcaller/motion-memorymanagement (based on mikeash's MAZeroingWeakRef) is still the better alternative.
derengel 13y ago
Is there a way to play with it for people who can't still afford it?
mark_l_watson 13y ago
Please pardon an off topic question: is the compiled code from RubyMotion similar to Objective-C compiled code? (Within a factor of 2 or 3 in speed?) Thanks.
- jballanc 13y ago
  In the large majority of cases, compiled RubyMotion is indistinguishable from Obj-C, both in terms of speed and size.
scorpion032 13y ago
I am very keen to know what Apple thinks about RubyMotion. It seems like a fine tool; but it's not typical Apple to allow external commercial vendor to influence it's core development environment. Anyone from Apple, or anyone that gained the sense in events like WWDC, care to share?
- cpr 13y ago
  Apple made it clear a few years back that any language that compiles to "normal" binaries is fine, after (at first) being completely restrictive about the tools you could use. Their major remaining rule is that you can't build environments that download code from the internet and run it. (Except for Javascript, and you have to use JavaScriptCore (Apple-supplied) for that.)
Raticide 13y ago
Looks awesome. I just wish it was free and open.

185 points by jballanc 13y ago

relix 13y ago

That's awesome. I recently tried to get into MacRuby development, but there's a serious dearth out there of resources (for the beginner), and I had to guess on how to do a lot of things. Hopefully the RubyMotion support will be better!

gnufied 13y ago

This is excellent news. I purchased RubyMotion when it came out and largely didn't use it for awhile. Since last 3 months our company which is entirely made of Rails/JS guys have been building small apps using RubyMotion. I didn't know they were working on OSX support. But this is huge for me, back on GNU/Linux GUI programming using dynamic languages is easy. py-gtk/ruby-gnome2 bindings really work well and It is incredibly awesome that you can build small utils for yourself in a afternoon using py-gtk/ruby-gnome2. Ability to do the same for OSX is exciting!

mattetti 13y ago

And here is how MacRuby developers were lied to and the RubyMotion project made the choice to not contribute back but instead to focus on keeping innovation proprietary. https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2012-April/008702.html https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2012-Ap... It's quite a sad day to think that Apple invested on MacRuby and kept it open source... and RubyMotion chose another route even for OS X dev.

venus 13y ago
Oh yes, what a horrid selfish man, trying to feed his family and make a business for himself. Not like generous, giving, open source-loving Apple! Give me a break. The guy's made something amazing. Good on him for charging for it, making a success of it, so much so that we now have a version 2.0. This would never have come from some lousy half-hearted Apple mailing list. I am happy to pay for this product, and I do not blame him for keeping it proprietary. I just don't see what your point is. It seems like you just want something for nothing and are dressing that up in some unlikely open-source clothes.
- coherentpony 13y ago
  You have completely missed the point. Charging for software is not a crime. The point is that he lied to the open source community about his intentions.
  - plorkyeran 13y ago
    It has been over a year since that post. It is not at all implausible that the post accurately described his intentions at the time he wrote it.
  - venus 13y ago
    Your accusation that he deliberately lied, rather than simply changed his mind, has no foundation whatsoever.
    - acangiano 13y ago
      I can vouch for this. Laurent and I heavily discussed RubyMotion in its early days. His idea was to create a mobile solution (ergo Motion in the name) and had no intention whatsoever to include Mac OS X development at the time. It turns out however that the market wanted a unified toolchain. Many customers asked for it. And Laurent, like any good business person would, listened to the needs of his customers.
      - mattetti 13y ago
        Antonio, but nothing prevented him to contribute back to MacRuby (OS X) the required changes to get rid of the GC and therefore to not rely on deprecated technology.
        carterschonwald 13y ago
        Tough shit. He's trying to support himself and his employees. Likewise, backporting their work to a even slightly different code base would require time they frankly don't have. Unless you have a time travel device you can give him, don't demand time he doesn't have. Laurent frankly is underpricing his wonderful tools, and has to support himself and all those folks he's hired. Time is finite, and no human can do all the things they'd like to do. Modifying RubyMotion to have the right hooks for the OS X apis etc is likely much simpler than fixing up MacRuby architecturally. Point being, people have finite time, they can't do all the things they want to. Either be nice or give him a time turning / time travel device
colinta 13y ago
If you don't like RubyMotion, then don't buy a license. Plain as that! Thanks Laurent, Shizuo, and the FANTASTIC RubyMotion community!
alloy 13y ago
[Disclaimer: MacRuby core member here.] I agree, it’s too bad that people can’t just work for free as much as they would like on the stuff they love. Now it is true that Laurent himself has not touched the repo since that email you linked to, but you know just as well as me that Watson has been doing maintenance work on MacRuby while on the payroll of RubyMotion (HipByte). His latest commit was 15 days ago and here’s a generalised diff of all the work done since the email: https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/compare/94c90b351c18ce1f59a3add8b525baf466e4dace...3f0dd69a4cc16a6fc7f7f00b6a1dc370d2fad80f https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/compare/94c90b351c18ce1f5.... This is what people with limited time resources do, they delegate. To conclude, when you’re out to paint someone black, you really should be more specific. As it stands, there are no lies in that email, which means that you are the one that is not telling the truth. I’m not sure why you want to spread FUD, but it’s quite obvious and really does not make you look professional. PS: Whatever Apple chose or chooses to do has absolutely no relevancy to this at all. The moment they released it as Open-Source, they effectively said that people can do what they want as long as they follow the license.
- flyingbeaver 13y ago
  Well put.
- mattetti 13y ago
  Alloy my point was not about maintenance but the fact that MacRuby relies on the ObjC GC which is now deprecated. In this email thread Laurent acknowledge the need to switch to static compilation and that he has a working branch he will soon merge. This is exactly what RubyMotion just released and I'm saddened that it was not contributed back as promised. It's as simple as that.
  - 1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
    I've been losing respect for HipByte. Laurent is making tough calls, I'll bide my time.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Well, spoking of broken promises and people abandoning things, didn't you write a book on MacRuby and a couple of articles touting it, and then abandoned the project for greener pastures (Ruby, Go and such)? What about the folks that bought into the book and MacRuby, thinking that it was a viable project, and then see you, one of the (few) main contributors abandon it -- and long before today's release of RubyMotion.
hlidotbe 13y ago
Apple invested in MacRuby? What a joke! This project was almost singlehandedly held by one person. I know for a fact that Apple doesn't give a fuck about MacRuby, don't fool yourself about that.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Who ask for this misinformed opinion? >Apple invested in MacRuby? What a joke! Yes, it did. Back in the day, MacRuby started by Apple employees and initial development was paid by Apple. >This project was almost singlehandedly held by one person. Which is beside the point. >I know for a fact that Apple doesn't give a fuck about MacRuby You don't say! That has been the case several years now, since Apple stopped supporting the project. Everybody in the MacRuby community knows this. >don't fool yourself about that. Thank you, Captain Informed.
deedubaya 13y ago
As someone who wrote a number of MacRuby apps, I find the support for OSX wonderful. MacRuby is slow and clunky. Fact. This is a big improvement performance wise. Do I mind paying for that improvement? Hell no. MacRuby development has pretty much halted once it lost Apple Support. I don't mind paying for something that will be maintained and improved upon.
octopus 13y ago
I wouldn't take this personally, it is just a smart business decision. It makes sense that once you buy a RubyMotion license to be able to use the same toolchain on OS X. Also, I wouldn't mind paying for RubyMotion as long as I'm assured the project will go forward. Unfortunately MacRuby lost momentum when Apple decided to not support the project anymore.
stevoski 13y ago
Lied? or changed his mind?
thibaut_barrere 13y ago
I find that it's a happy day, not a sad day (even if I like open-source). Why? Because now some of my customers are going to seriously think about using Ruby for Mac OS X apps, because they know someone is making profit while supporting this, so they feel they can rely on this. I much prefer this to the fate of IronRuby (or to some extent, MacRuby). Remember what you wrote one year ago [1] ? Using RubyMotion for a professional product represents a significant business risk, which is exactly the same as using proprietary technology from any vendor. It turns out the opposite is coming to reality :p [1] http://merbist.com/2012/05/04/macruby-on-ios-rubymotion-review/ http://merbist.com/2012/05/04/macruby-on-ios-rubymotion-revi...

coherentpony 13y ago

I'm not sure I understand this. Is RubyMotion just a set of wrappers around Objective-C classes to allow you to develop applications in Ruby? If so, why? Is the point to allow Rubyists that don't want to learn Objective-C to develop applications in Ruby?

mikelbring 13y ago
Thats part of it and you do not have to use Xcode. Some of the gems such as BubbleWrapper also created a really nice syntax.
sbarre 13y ago
That is exactly the point.
zerr 13y ago
Agree. Not language but API should be fixed.
- colinta 13y ago
  Disagree. And that's why we have RubyMotion! :-)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- tamersalama 13y ago
  RubyMine IDE from IntelliJ [1] is a nice part of the tool-chain. It has auto-complete for RubyMotion. [1] http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/ http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/
  - film42 13y ago
    I was about to ask about this. RubyMotion seems amazing, but sometimes objective-c is about just opening that auto-complete and seeing what methods are at your disposal.

DigitalJack 13y ago

Can RubyMotion work with GNUStep?

colinta 13y ago
I doubt this has ever been tried, but I seriously doubt it... the compiler does a lot of work looking at the Cocoa frameworks to build the bridgesupport files. Are GNUStep frameworks built the same way?

cnp 13y ago

SO rad!

mamcx 13y ago

How I wish something like this exist for python..

colinta 13y ago
The closest thing I know about is Kivy.
srik 13y ago
PySide isn't half as bad as you might remember. And yes, kivy is pretty respectable and only getting better. They did win a little grant too recently.

chrisdevereux 13y ago

Anyone had experience incrementally adopting rubymotion in a larger objective-c project? The languages obviously match up pretty well, I'm thinking more about toolchains, etc. Would love to play with this but am fairly invested in a big obj-c thing right now.

colinta 13y ago
I haven't done a larger project, but I did port a small project by starting with just the AppDelegate. It was easier to first turn the xcode project/obj-c code into a library, and compile it as such. The classes "just worked", and with all the nibs in resources/ those loaded, too! I translated the models into Ruby, and pulled those out of the xcode lib. Eventually the entire codebase was converted (except the nibs).

pjmlp 13y ago

It would be nice to have it in other platforms, anyway it quite nice to have the option to natively compile Ruby code.

gfodor 13y ago

Beyond the OSX support the weakref support is very welcome!

hboon 13y ago
WeakRef still doesn't zero out collected references, so https://github.com/farcaller/motion-memorymanagement https://github.com/farcaller/motion-memorymanagement (based on mikeash's MAZeroingWeakRef) is still the better alternative.

derengel 13y ago

Is there a way to play with it for people who can't still afford it?

mark_l_watson 13y ago

Please pardon an off topic question: is the compiled code from RubyMotion similar to Objective-C compiled code? (Within a factor of 2 or 3 in speed?) Thanks.

jballanc 13y ago
In the large majority of cases, compiled RubyMotion is indistinguishable from Obj-C, both in terms of speed and size.

scorpion032 13y ago

I am very keen to know what Apple thinks about RubyMotion. It seems like a fine tool; but it's not typical Apple to allow external commercial vendor to influence it's core development environment. Anyone from Apple, or anyone that gained the sense in events like WWDC, care to share?

cpr 13y ago
Apple made it clear a few years back that any language that compiles to "normal" binaries is fine, after (at first) being completely restrictive about the tools you could use. Their major remaining rule is that you can't build environments that download code from the internet and run it. (Except for Javascript, and you have to use JavaScriptCore (Apple-supplied) for that.)

Raticide 13y ago

Looks awesome. I just wish it was free and open.