[MacRuby-devel] Hotcocoa design ethos [was Re: [feature request] open url in browser]

[Benjamin Stiglitz]

> So, which is it, guys?  A glorified macro pre-processor with enough  
> canned macros to illustrate how to use the same approach in your own  
> applications, or an attempt to simplify Cocoa programming where it  
> genuinely cries out for simplification, hopefully also in cases  
> which are commonly used enough to generate real bang-for-buck?

Rich, Laurent and I talked about this at length this weekend, and I  
think we can safely say that we’d to improve upon Cocoa and Mac OS X  
development in Ruby.

One example we cooked up was this:

play_sound do |t|
   sin(440.0 * t * 2.0 * Math::PI)
end

Setting up a simple CoreAudio configuration is a pain; you need to  
dive into the component manager, and wire together a bunch of  
callbacks and audio units, and…ugh. In HotCocoa we have a chance to  
make audio generation into a nice simple operation.

We had plenty more ideas; I’m sure they’ll be shared in this forum  
when we all get caught up on the rest of our lives.

-Ben