RubyMotion brings serious Ruby development to the iOS world

For the past several months I’ve been involved with, but unable to publicly discuss, an exciting project called RubyMotion. My friend Laurent Sansonetti, creator of MacRuby, has now officially launched a serious alternative to Objective-C for iPhone and iPad development. RubyMotion is not a bridge; it actually generates native applications that are as fast as the ones written in Objective-C . You can check...

Programming in Objective-C, 3rd Edition is out

Addison-Wesley quietly released the third edition of their Programming in Objective-C book (USA | UK | Canada). I own the first edition of the book and it’s stellar, so I’m really looking forward to reading this upgraded version which includes the latest changes to the language, the main IDE (XCode), and the Foundation framework for developing Mac, iPad, and iPhone...

Would you use a Mac mini as your development machine?

Apple just released a brand new, gorgeous looking Mac mini. This major upgrade brings us two different models: a desktop one and a server version (priced at $699 and $999, respectively). Equipped with a HDMI port, the desktop edition of the Mac mini makes for a perfect Home Theater PC. It’s small and stylish, and as such is a great fit in your living room. Most of the reviews I’ve read focus on its use...

Why MacRuby Matters (Present & Future)

Over the years the inadequacy of Ruby’s main implementation has led to the creation of several alternatives. The greatest common divisor between these is an attempt to improve the performance of Ruby, both in terms of time and space. But every Ruby implementation has another, deeper reason for being. For example, Ruby 1.9.1 is a refactoring of the language that provides the chance to incorporate several much...

Don’t alienate developers

Remember Ballmer shouting ad nauseam “Developers, developers, developers”? I’m sure you’ve seen the original video and even a few techno remixes. Whether he truly meant it or not, his message was correct: it’s all about developers. Any platform that doesn’t attract developers is bound to fail. Microsoft is trying to make an effort to please developers by shifting to a more open...

Ruby, Python, Haskell and Objective-C Feed Survey

Having little time to follow the blogosphere and its crazy rhythms of publication is not a good enough excuse for not being up to date. This rings particularly true for me as a technical evangelist at IBM, and as someone who is deeply passionate about the development and the information technology world. The biggest challenge is to quickly and efficiently divide the wheat from the chaff or, in other words, filter...

DB2 on Mac

Python and DB2 We now have a working Python driver for DB2 which is currently undergoing internal testing. The driver is similar to the Ruby and PHP ones, which means that you get an advanced and very easy to use API. It also means that if you are confident with the Ruby driver, you will be able to use the Python one in no time. Ruby: require 'ibm_db' conn = IBM_DB::connect(database, user, password) if conn ...

A preliminary review of three Cocoa and Objective-C related books

As announced before, I got interested in Mac development, bought a bunch of books and spent a few nights reading and coding. Here are my first impressions on those books which thus far I’ve picked up. I only had time to read 3 chapters from Stephen Kochan’s book and I must say that I’m not impressed! The pace is extremely slow and experienced programmers who read it will be bored to tears. An...

Cocoa is my Cup of Tea

Writing the article “Desktop Applications are not dead!” was an interesting experience that led to vivid discussions about the business of software for desktop applications, including the current limits and options available in this field. In the last comment by Eugueny Kontsevoy (the person I was responding to with my article in the first place), he expressed once again his frustration regarding Windows...