Jan 16
Mac Applications with MacRuby
AddHi sports fans.
Over the last couple of weeks I have been experimenting with an implementation of Ruby named MacRuby. MacRuby enables the use of Ruby as a programming language for the development of Cocoa Mac apps. I love this idea, and so I’ve had a bit of a play around with the Framework. My initial efforts can be found here: http://rivup.com/ Although the app is quite trivial in nature it did serve as an excellent learning platform, enabling me to get used to the layout of Xcode (I normally use TextMate) have a play around with interface builder, and get a general introduction to the Cocoa API.
Moving forward I can see MacRuby being an excellent way of enticing web programmers (like myself) into application development. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this up and running for iPhone development at some stage. At the moment we will alas have to be contented with Mac apps in Ruby. I also found the experience of programming Ruby with the Cocoa API’s very useful. This could be an excellent bridge into the writing native Objective-C code (although I’d much rather deal with the Ruby syntax).
One note on the current state of the MacRuby project. A lot of development is going on behind the scenes and in the rush some features of MacRuby are broken and others are buggy. There is a further abstraction of Objective-C development available called HotCocoa. This enables Ruby developers to write pure ruby applications without using Xcode and it’s companion tools. Alas HotCocoa appears to currently be broken, but hopefully will be back on track soon. I also found a few bugs with compiling Ruby files into binary format, so if you run into problems with that trying building your app without that stage.
Things I’d like to see in the future:
iPhone app support
The MacRuby framework and libs bundled as standard with future versions of OS X. This would remove the need to embed the entire Framework in each MacRuby app.
HotCocoa fixed.
Note: Hotcocoa is now fixed in the nightly builds.
Posted by: Ian Alexander Wood