[MacRuby-devel] [ANN] Launch: Redwood - Spotlight for the cloud

[Derek Haynes]

Redwood is a "Spotlight for the cloud" -- it searches Basecamp, Gmail,
Google Docs, and Pivotal Tracker from one search bar on your desktop.
You can download Redwood from our homepage:

http://redwoodapp.com

We've loved developing the app with MacRuby. Details on the technical guts:

* MacRuby 0.10, embedded in the application bundle
* Originally we used the Nokogiri and GData gems. However, we dropped
these as the load time took several seconds during the application
launch. A likely cause: gems are not compiled like the application
code. The performance during application usage was fine.
* Several Obj-C libraries: Sqlite3 and FMDB for database,
ASIHTTPRequest for HTTP, Sparkle for auto-update, SBJson, and CocoaFob
+ Potion Store (a Rails app) for licensing.
* Search results are rendered in HTML/CSS, and events are passed back
and forth between an embedded Webview and Cocoa

We'll provide a richer overview of our experience w/MacRuby in a
couple of weeks on our blog.

Give the full-featured trial a whirl and let me know how it goes:
http://redwoodapp.com

Cheers,

Derek