[MacRuby-devel] The Future of MacRuby

[Andrew Havens]

I've been a lurker in this mailing list for a while now. Sad to hear we've lost a project lead but glad to hear Matt has identified many of the issues I've been feeling myself.

I'm a self-taught web developer. I never had any interest in learning native app development until I heard about MacRuby. Now I've written a few sample apps and one "production" app. I think MacRuby is a great resource to the Ruby community and I think web developers are MacRuby's target audience. All of my MacRuby apps are GUIs for other Ruby libraries or gems.

The biggest thing that I feel is lacking at this point (which Matt mentioned) are adequate "getting started" and reference guides. I had a heck of a time trying to create my first app. I had to scrounge together blog posts, StackOverflow questions, and Objective-C docs. I think some good guides (like Rails guides) would go a long way towards increasing adoption. Also moving this mailing list to Google Groups and splitting it into MacRuby-core and MacRuby-help would provide a place for newbies to get help. In fact I started a Google group for just that purpose since I was frustrated that there was no mailing list for people starting out (but never told anyone so I'm the only one who ever used it). But I would love to see an official one. All the open source projects I know of have a Google group since they are easy to use and subscribe to.

I also feel like XCode is a major hurdle. If you're already familiar with XCode, that's great, but as a web developer, I spend most of my day in TextMate (or command line). I would love to see some code samples of a REAL app created from scratch (not using XCode, multiple files/object oriented) because that's how I would like to work with MacRuby (from the text editor of my choice, rather than be forced into using Apple's IDE, regardless of whether or not it's better). I installed MacRuby from the command line via RVM so I want to generate a .app from the command line too.

I think Ruby on Rails is seen as a productive programming environment. I think a big part of that is due to its many command line generators. A lot of people learned how to use Rails by looking at the code generated by the scaffolding created. If there was more emphasis towards using MacRuby from the command line, I could see more people writing MacRuby app scaffolding generators.

I also think that there's a big movement towards writing native apps using web technologies (write once, run everywhere mobile apps using JavaScript, i.e. Titanium Mobile, PhoneGap). I think this is huge since nobody wants to learn a language that's proprietary to a single device/company. However, I don't want to write JavaScript unless it looks more like Ruby (thanks CoffeeScript). If I could write an iOS app in MacRuby I would. I'm not sure how this would work though. I included MacRuby in my Snow Leopard app and it increased the app file size tremendously. File size is important when it comes to mobile.

Those are my thoughts. Again, I think MacRuby is great and mostly complete. More code samples and documentation are a high priority at this point in my opinion.

--Andrew Havens

P.S. If you're interested, I'm working on an open source version of HipChat that I call Mad Chatter. I used MacRuby to create the native Mac client. https://github.com/andrewhavens/mad_chatter
Contributors more than welcome!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/attachments/20120406/94367c35/attachment.html>