February 2011 - MacRuby-devel - lists.macosforge.org

macfuse example broken again?
by Joel Reymont 10 Feb '11

10 Feb '11

Is it just me or has the hellofs example [1] stopped working again? [1] http://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/922 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- - mac osx device driver ninja, kernel extensions and user-land usb drivers ---------------------+------------+--------------------------------------- http://wagerlabs.com | @wagerlabs | http://www.linkedin.com/in/joelreymont ---------------------+------------+---------------------------------------

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macfuse
by Joel Reymont 09 Feb '11

09 Feb '11

Am I dreaming or was there an example of MacRuby with MacFUSE? Thanks, Joel -------------------------------------------------------------------------- - mac osx device driver ninja, kernel extensions and user-land usb drivers ---------------------+------------+--------------------------------------- http://wagerlabs.com | @wagerlabs | http://www.linkedin.com/in/joelreymont ---------------------+------------+---------------------------------------

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open('|foo') semantics not supported?
by Caio Chassot 09 Feb '11

09 Feb '11

Quick test: $ ruby -e 'open("|pbcopy", "w") { |io| io << "test #{rand}" }; puts(`pbpaste`)' test 0.8639874244022235 $ macruby -e 'open("|pbcopy", "w") { |io| io << "test #{rand}" }; puts(`pbpaste`)' -e:1:in `<main>': not opened for writing (IOError) Why the error with MacRuby?

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BridgeSupport Requirement
by Martin Hawkins 09 Feb '11

09 Feb '11

I installed BridgeSupport Preview 3 in order to resolve some issues related to errors looking up constant values. The new BridgeSupport worked fine and the application I have been working runs fine. I have 'embedded' MacRuby so that it can be distributed but here I come unstuck. When run on a computer that does not have the BridgeSupport upgrade, it crashes; it seems that, while the app makes no reference to the MacRuby framework, it does need the new version of BridgeSupport in order to run. This makes the notion of an embedding fragile - is there a way to embed the required BridgeSupport, or must I require that users upgrade their BrigeSupport before they install my app.?

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Trying to use spotlight programmatically
by Martin Hawkins 08 Feb '11

08 Feb '11

This is really beyond the remit of this group, but I thought I'd try here first as you guys are so helpful! I'm trying to use spotlight programmatically. I've downloaded the sample apps and used ideas from those - the code works fine in MacRuby. Where I'm coming unstuck is when I try to search mail. When creating an ordinary spotlight search, you can add a criteria 'Spotlight items are included'. This is required when searching on something like Author Email addresses (which translates to kMDItemAuthorEmailAddresses), because without it, no hits are recorded. I mention kMDItemAuthorEmailAddresses because as the attribute exists, the expectation that a query can be parsed using it is set. If you create two searches, one with and one without the spotlight requirements line, save the searches and compare them (they are in .plist format), the one with the 'Spotlight items are included' criteria has the key FinderFilesOnly set to false: <key>FinderFilesOnly</key> <false/> and the following extra criteria in FXCriteriaSlices: <dict> <key>criteria</key> <array> <string>com_apple_SearchSpotlightItemsAttribute</string> <integer>1230</integer> </array> <key>displayValues</key> <array> <string>SEARCH_SPOTLIGHT_ITEMS</string> <string>YES</string> </array> <key>rowType</key> <integer>0</integer> <key>subrows</key> <array/> </dict> I can't see documentation that explains how to achieve this programmatically; my programmatic search, like the ordinary spotlight search without the 'Spotlight items are included', yields 0 hits at the moment. Any help very welcome!

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Close Current window and Pass Data
by Buddy Lindsey, Jr. 07 Feb '11

07 Feb '11

I have had some good success in getting large chunks of my app done, but there are a few things that I can't seem to figure out, or at least get to working. I was able to figure out how to open up a new window that was based on a xib file, but what I really want to do is open the new window and close the current one which opened the new one. Also in the process of opening the new window I want to pass some data, at this point a single string. What is the best way to go about this? My lack of experience with cocoa, and by extension objective-c, is really killing me on figuring this out. Unfortuneatly there isn't just a simple close() method to call. Here is the code I am playing with to get this to work. Any help would be appreciated. https://gist.github.com/813803 Thanks Buddy --- Buddy Lindsey http://www.buddylindsey.com http://www.twitter.com/buddylindsey

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MacRuby Book expectations
by Jean-Denis Muys 07 Feb '11

07 Feb '11

On 4 févr. 2011, at 05:53, "Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)piermont.com> wrote: > > On Thu, 3 Feb 2011 17:35:08 -0800 Matt Aimonetti > <mattaimonetti(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> I don't really aim for this book to be a Cocoa book, but a MacRuby >> book which is really hard since it's like writing a book about >> Objective-C without covering Cocoa in depth. > > It does make it a bit harder to use, though, for someone coming at > this without an extensive Cocoa background... > > -- > Perry E. Metzger perry(a)piermont.com > I am at the other end of the spectrum: I am an experienced Cocoa/Objective-C programmer and a Ruby newbie. I strongly believe that I am in the demographics for the book. I don't expect the MacRuby book to teach me Ruby. Quite often, when reading the book (in its current form), I feel I don't understand the code snippets, simply because I don't know Ruby. What I do then, is put aside the MacRuby book, pull out a generic Ruby book (or Google), and research that part of Ruby I don't understand. Granted, this slows me down considerably in my reading of the book, but I believe this is the correct way for me to learn. I would suggest the converse is valid for experienced Ruby programmers. When you feel you don't understand some Cocoa bit, you can go to Apple documentation (on the web or from Xcode), and research it. It's rather good. I don't think it is reasonable to expect that a MacRuby book should teach you Cocoa.That would be a different book, possibly titled "Cocoa Programming with MacRuby". The example of Core Data is a good example. Core Data is a framework that I had a hard time understanding in the first place, irrespective of the language. Full books have been written about Core Data. It is not reasonable to expect the MacRuby book to teach you Core Data. So what are *my* expectations for a MacRuby book? I expect the book to address two facets of software development with MacRuby: - How to integrate MacRuby in my software development tool set on the Mac. This includes topics such as: • Using Xcode with MacRuby (other IDEs too when applicable). • How to use MacRuby to develop Cocoa Apps. • How to "add" MacRuby code to an Objective-C Cocoa App. • How to "add" Objective-C code to a MacRuby Cocoa App. • How to take advantage of Ruby's dynamisms in Cocoa. How to fix bugs without restarting the application for example. • How to debug (breakpoint, step, trace) MacRuby code in a Cocoa app from Xcode • How to add a REPL (Read Eval Print Loop) to a Cocoa app • How to expose a Ruby evaluator to a Cocoa app (for kind of Spreadsheet-like features for example) • How to use standard Ruby libraries (are these called gems?) in a Cocoa app. • The dynamic runtime: what it can bring you, how to use it… • Interface builder and MacRuby: outlets, actions, bindings. • Key-Value Coding and Observing. How does it fit with Ruby's introspection feature. - How to take advantage of/cope with the idiomatic differences between Ruby and Objective-C/Cocoa. From adopting an Objective-C style to a full Ruby style (was that HotCocoa's goal?), the spectrum is quite large I guess. No size fits all. But a cookbook approach could be useful. Select a number of typical Ruby idioms, discuss when they would be interesting to use in a Cocoa context, and how to do so. Core Data and ORM might be a large such example. A smaller example would be using map/apply/reduce with Cocoa's collections: how do they fit with Cocoa's iteration facilities… But I don't expect the book to: - teach me about Cocoa: I already know that stuff. I don't need it. - teach me about Ruby: I don't know that stuff, and I really need it, but I can find it elsewhere. For those two needs, the book could possibly help with footnotes and/or sidebars with pointers to the relevant literature. This is not easy to write. It is difficult for the author to anticipate that such and such point under discussion uses some construct that might be foreign to some reader but not others. This probably requires readers of all possible profiles to point those out. Such a book would then benefit both populations of experienced programmers. It would probably not be the book for an absolute beginner. But that would be another book altogether (I would love such a book to teach programming to children/teenagers). Jean-Denis

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How to detect Cylons with MacRuby
by Martin Hawkins 05 Feb '11

05 Feb '11

I was just looking for info relating to debugging when I re-discovered this post. In it, there's a suggestion that somebody might work on XCode integration. Has there been any development around debugging?

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Note of warning about Xcode 4
by Vincent Isambart 05 Feb '11

05 Feb '11

Hi, As many of you probably know the Xcode 4 GM has been released, even though for the time being it's still under NDA and only available to registered developers. It should probably be released publicly soon. IMPORTANT: If you are developing a MacRuby application you should wait before installing it: Xcode 3 get upgraded to Xcode 4. However there is currently no support for MacRuby in Xcode 4: - First the templates for Xcode 4 are not yet available (though they should be added to the MacRuby repository when Xcode 4 is not under NDA anymore) ; - But the biggest problem is that currently there is no MacRuby support in the interface editor: the actions and properties added in the Ruby code won't appear in the interface editor. Cheers

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book idea - "making it look like Ruby"
by Rich Morin 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

One of my concerns with both MacRuby and JRuby is that the resulting code doesn't look much like Ruby. As Mark Twain put it: ... If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat. While skimming "Using JRuby", I saw a few suggestions about ways to alias Java calls (etc) to make the code look more like Ruby. Unfortunately, there wasn't as much of this as I would have liked and it wasn't in a single chapter, for easy reference. Regardless of HotCocoa's failings, it certainly helps to make MacRuby look more like Ruby than Objective-C. Even if HC isn't covered, per se, I'd like to see some coverage of these sorts of style issues. -r -- http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume rdm(a)cfcl.com http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841 Software system design, development, and documentation

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