[MacRuby-devel] Hotcocoa documentation

Jordan K. Hubbard jkh at apple.com
Sat Oct 2 11:19:24 PDT 2010


I think the issue wasn't that HotCocoa was "dropped" so much as people, including its primary author, seemed to simply lose interest in updating it.  That is why the project was moved to github, in hopes that someone else would fork it and start doing interesting things with the project again.

Bigger picture, I think the lack of interest also stems from the fact that it's generally a lot easier to do User Interface programming in Interface Builder, and a set of what are in effect UI element macros can only go so far in papering over the more intricate details of implementing a Cocoa app.  From an evolutionary standpoint, it's hard to argue that HotCocoa isn't something of a dead-end, though that's also describing HotCocoa in its *current* form.  The success of high-level development toolkits like Processing (in Java) suggests that there is a place for very high-level, concise ways of making pretty graphics on the screen or interesting sounds come out the speakers, and with a fair bit more work it's possible that HotCocoa could become that.  But not without volunteers to work on it. :-)

- Jordan

On Oct 1, 2010, at 10:34 PM, Felix Holmgren wrote:

> Is there some information somewhere about why Hotcocoa was dropped? If
> not, a few words of explanation here would be appreciated! Hotcocoa
> does stand out as a pretty nifty gadget, although I can imagine it's a
> lot of work to maintain it.
> 
> /Felix
> 
> 2010/10/2 Laurent Sansonetti <lsansonetti at apple.com>:
>> Hi Michael,
>> 
>> On Oct 1, 2010, at 7:07 PM, Michael Sokol wrote:
>> 
>>> Hello
>>> 
>>> I just discovered Macruby and Hotcocoa, and I must say that I'm very excited about it. Hotcocoa is nothing short of amazing and I love the ease with which you can build a Mac application using Ruby.
>>> 
>>> The only problem I have though, is that I didn't find a real documentation showing hotcocoa API. I'm using the examples, but it's very limited. I was wondering if any API documentation exists, and if not, what is the best way to know each methods available and their parameters?
>> 
>> I am afraid HotCocoa is no longer actively developed neither maintained (I recommend to avoid using it). The project lives on github now and people willing to help should do it there.
>> 
>> http://github.com/richkilmer/hotcocoa
>> 
>> Laurent
> _______________________________________________
> MacRuby-devel mailing list
> MacRuby-devel at lists.macosforge.org
> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel



More information about the MacRuby-devel mailing list