[MacRuby-devel] HowTo help request

[Rich Morin]

A few weeks ago, Laurent and I chatted about some possible HowTo
articles.  Unfortunately, he is far too busy to create the raw
materials that I volunteered to wordsmith (and I don't have the
MacRuby/ObjC/... chops needed to do his part):

At 23:06 -0700 4/27/09, Laurent Sansonetti wrote:
> For the article, I have 0 time to do it, sorry.  What about
> describing our idea on the mailing list and see if someone
> is willing to help?


If anyone on the list would like to create some example code and
notes, I'll be happy to work with you on this (and I suspect that
Laurent _would_ have time to provide incidental help and review).

Anyway, my proposal is that we create a series of HowTos:

  *  "Adding MacRuby to TextEdit"

     This would cover the pre-conditions (eg, MacRuby, Xcode),
     then explain how to add MacRuby to the TextEdit build.

     If possible, the last part of the HowTo should contain
     examples of calling internal TextEdit methods from irb.
     This would demonstrate MacRuby's utility as a tool for
     exploratory programming.

  *  "Replacing ObjC methods with MacRuby"

     This would show how to replace the major kinds of ObjC
     methods with MacRuby code.  At some point, it might be
     cool to have a MacRuby-only implementation of TextEdit.
     For now, however, this HowTo could show the basics of
     supplanting existing code in an application.

  *  "Extending TextEdit with MacRuby"

     This HowTo would demonstrate how MacRuby can be used
     to add functionality to an application.  I'm not sure,
     offhand, what kinds of functionality we should add,
     but I'd like to end up with the ability to load Ruby
     code from a ".textedit.rb" (or whatever) file.

So, is anyone up for this?

-r
-- 
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm            Rich Morin
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume     rdm at cfcl.com
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog     +1 650-873-7841

Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development