Programming Zen

RubyMotion brings serious Ruby development to the iOS world

Antonio Cangiano

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 out Ars Technica’s exclusive article for more details on the project and watch the Pragmatic Studio’s 50 minute free screencast about it to get a better idea of how RubyMotion works in practice.

RubyMotionFor a limited time you can buy RubyMotion at an early bird discount rate of 25% off. It’s such a productive and affordable solution, that I’m sure it will quickly become popular among Ruby developers who are interested in iOS development and testing, as well as among existing iOS developers.

Many of the questions you may have can likely be found in the FAQ section, but feel free to ask any additional questions here. Enjoy it.

Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano is an Engineering Manager and AI Specialist at IBM. He authored Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers (Wrox, 2009) and Technical Blogging (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2012, 2019). He is also the Marketing Lead for Cognitive Class, an educational initiative which he helped grow from zero to over 3 Million students. You can follow him on Twitter.

10 responses to “RubyMotion brings serious Ruby development to the iOS world”

  1. roger

    So basically this compiles ruby code to objective C? It’s kind of like mirah?

    1. Antonio Cangiano

      Not quite. This compiles ruby code to machine code, much like Objective-C does.

  2. Michel Pigassou

    What is the difference between this and an app coded with MacRuby?

    1. Antonio Cangiano

      RubyMotion is built on top of MacRuby. However you can’t use MacRuby for developing iOS apps. Obviously, RubyMotion allows you to do that. In terms of code, knowing MacRuby would make you feel right at home.

  3. Hahahaha

    > We do not believe that Xcode makes a good environment for … development in general).

    Hilarious.

    Why not just learn the right tool for the job instead of making Ruby fit every single task? You learn more that way.

    1. Antonio Cangiano

      Familiarity? Preference? I think it’s great that there is an alternative that actually just worksTM.

  4. TVD

    Congratulations and Go get ’em!

  5. john

    Will I be able to write Mac apps with rubymotion?

    1. Antonio Cangiano

      No, but you can use MacRuby for that.

  6. Daniel

    Can you explain how MacRuby was modified to enable this? How is garbage collection handled/not handled?

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