

RubyMotion Success Story: Cabify - thibaut_barrere
http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/30514580062/rubymotion-success-story-cabify

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jballanc
Congrats to Mark on his success! For those who haven't had a chance to follow
along, Mark has been a constant presence in the community and I'm glad to see
his drive and willingness to take the initiative has paid off. His story is
also a perfect example of why it is so important to get out, give talks, and
participate in your local development communities, even if "local" doesn't
overlap with "Silicon Valley" or "NYC".

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javierhonduco
That's a very good point to focus on. Thank you! ;)

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mmahemoff
Just curious - are developers putting themselves at risk by revealing they're
using RubyMotion? ie risk of being penalised in app store or possibly even
banned if Apple's policy swung back to how it used to be.

I assume there's no way to tell an app is RubyMotion by inspecting the UI,
though maybe it's possible to tell from the binary?

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jballanc
You would have to be rather talented and put in a non-trivial amount of effort
to tell a RubyMotion app from any other iOS app. A while back there was a
conversation in IRC where one person was trying to do just that and kept
coming up short...

 _Edit_ : Also, "how it used to be" was a stupid, knee-jerk reaction to Adobe
and caused significant consternation even within Apple (disclaimer: I was
working at Apple at the time). Furthermore, considering that the single most
recognizable "App Store" brand utilizes a non-trivial amount of Lua, there is
essentially zero risk that things will go back to "how it used to be".

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ylem
How does cabify differ from uber? I haven't used either...

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macuenca
I haven't used Über, but the idea is exactly the same and the apps are very
much alike. I live in Madrid, which is one of the cities where Cabify
operates. I've used their service a couple of times and I can only recommend
it. Looks like a good place to work and Mark Villa Camp, the guy mentioned in
the article is a well known name in the Spanish tech scene.

Is Cabify a copycat? Whatever, is a well executed idea and I wish they
succeed.

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flatline3
I, for one, am not looking forward to an influx of Rails engineers redefining
the iOS development culture in their image.

The lack of respect for knowledge gained over 20+ years of platform
development is staggering, but not unexpected. They're rejecting everything
from Interface Builder to the standard build tools, and adopting inferior web
ideas wholesale -- such as attempting to style native UI with CSS.

While it may be par for the course, I'd had hoped that our section of the
engineering field would be immune to influence from the Rails community.

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hans_olo
Heh, yeah. Look at that company. A 20 years old dude comes with some hipster
unproven technology and the boss jumps at it.

They are doomed to fail.

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cnp
RubyMotion changed the way our entire agency operates: we haven't outsourced a
single app in months. It's been the best thing to happen to us, hands down.

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flatline3
You could have also just learned how to write Objective-C. It'd be more fair
to your clients.

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cnp
How so? These responses are quite simply FUD.

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flatline3
For the same reason we don't use MonoTouch on client projects; it would creat
a maintenance and hiring nightmare for our clients. You jumped on RubyMotion
out of laziness or inability to learn something new.

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cnp
I absolutely believe that the process of developing an app with RubyMotion is
revolutionary in terms of mobile development. The flexibility of Ruby paired
with the interoperability with Obj-C is nothing but a win.

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flatline3
Says the individual that had to farm out mobile development until you could
use a language with which you were already familiar.

There's little I've seen in RubyMotion that provides a substantive improvement
on ObjC, and a lot that is worse than ObjC.

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cnp
It just depends on what you want to do. For example, if I wanted to develop a
3D shooter game do you think I would do it in Objective-C, C++, etc? No -- I'd
use Unity or Stage3D and then compile to the target.

For 90% of the fairly-standard apps that we'll ever develop, the overhead and
headaches and needless code-bloat that Objective-C brings to the project is
only a reminder of the elegance of Ruby and the beauty of simplicity. (It's
also a reminder that you'll no longer need to budget for XCode crashes every
hour.)

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rabenfrass
elegance, simplicity, beauty.. do those words emanate from Ruby in waves or
from your inability to give a technical description? what overhead and code-
bloat are you talking about? you can read the LLVM code and the objc runtime
from Apple and go into specifics if you like.

To write a 3D shooter you can use Objective-C specific features as much or as
little as you want. For intensive performance code you can bypass the
messaging system and write pure C, for the rest you can use Cocoa APIs. This
is what you do in any language. Unless you want to argue that dynamic
languages as a whole are not worth it.

If you are happy with RubyMotion go ahead, but don't preach bad mouthing a
language you haven't even developed on.

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hans_olo
Hmm, I have used Cabify and it's a horribly slow application. Now I know why.

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javierhonduco
As far as I'm concerned, Rubymotion shoudn't decrease the performance of an
app...

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firlefans
Yup Rubymotion isn't interpreted, it's compiled file by file to LLVM bytecode,
this negatively effects development speed but it means it runs (roughly) as
fast as pure obj-c (or so they claim on the rubymotion site). We're using it
at the moment to develop an app, it's great at keeping code DRY, debuggability
on device kinda sucks atm though.

