[MacRuby-devel] The Future of MacRuby

[Matt Aimonetti]

Thanks a lot Andrew for the feedback. I think you have some really great
points in there.
I'm letting others weigh-in to gage the interest and then we can start
getting organized.

- Matt

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 9:49 AM, Andrew Havens <Andrew.Havens at evanta.com>wrote:

>  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!
>
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> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
>
>
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