

RubyMotion Success Story: Jukely - jballanc
http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/44804097099/rubymotion-success-story-jukely

======
thetrumanshow
Godspeed you pioneers who are venturing forth and coming back to report on
your successes and failures. Many of us ObjC/XCode types that love Ruby are
carefully watching... But feel its still too early to take those chances.

I wish that I had watched PhoneGap more carefully. Had I paid attention, I
definitely wouldn't have chosen that route. I make that comparison because the
gotchas aren't apparent until you've fully invested. I think that same might
be true for RubyMotion. I'm happy to be wrong!

Would love your comments here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5344037>

~~~
acmecorps
True words.

\- From another Cocoa devs, who loves Ruby.

------
rmoriz
I just wrote a small iOS using RubyMotion myself and submitted it to the
appstore. It will look horrible because I am so bad at design and just stick
with the iOS defaults BUT it will work! It took me only a couple of days to
write and RubyMotion gems like "BubbleWrap" and "Formotion" helped me a lot.

RubyMotion is awesome because it's just a bridge to the iOS frameworks. You'll
have to learn the Apple provided frameworks but on the other hand using Ruby
and your favourite editor of choice is much easier than doing development with
3 unknowns (Objc, XCode, UIKit) at the beginning.

After some hours you can "migrate" objc code to RubyMotion in seconds, using
most Cocoapods is no problem.

BubbleWrap: <https://github.com/rubymotion/BubbleWrap>

Formotion: <https://github.com/clayallsopp/formotion>

Sugarcube: <https://github.com/rubymotion/sugarcube>

------
damoncali
I've not used RubyMotion despite coming from a Ruby background because it
looks like you wind up writing a lot of Ruby that ends up looking an awful lot
like, well, Objective C. It doesn't feel very much like Ruby. If the code is
just (or nearly) as verbose and obscure, why bother giving up Xcode,
storyboards, etc and adding a dependency on RubyMotion?

I feel like the hurdles of learning Cocoa are far greater than those of
Objective C, and potentially even tricker because you've got to translate it
into Ruby.

But I acknowledge this concern is not born of experience. Anyone care to
comment?

------
ceeK
A lot of these success stories with RubyMotion seem to come from newcomers to
iOS development like the creator of Jukely in this article. I can understand
that it must be a large benefit to adoption to be able to use Ruby rather than
learn Obj-C and at the same time XCode. Despite this, what I would like to
hear is the opinions of Obj-C iOS app developers who have used RubyMotion in
their projects.

I can't really see RubyMotion working in an app dev team at the moment. In my
last iOS job for instance, I was working on legacy Obj-C code. Can this easily
be ported over? Does it deal with retain/release well?

Also, can anybody comment on app development times Obj-C vs RubyMotion (given
that you know both)?.

~~~
gavingmiller
I took a foray into RubyMotion. The experience was wonderful programming wise.
I am much more comfortable/productive on the command line/vim than XCode.

My plan was to port an existing application over to RubyMotion so that I could
iterate faster on it. After a few days of work, the conclusion I came to was
that it wasn't worth porting an existing application over. I didn't try to
piece meal it (if someone demonstrates this, it will attract my attention),
just a full re-write.

For me the biggest hurdles were debugging. When something goes wrong it has to
be relatively easy to debug. I was in on the early days of RubyMotion and
found that their debug facilities were not sufficient enough for me (I think
I'm more towards the end of the early adopters curve.) It's also my
understanding that this has improved drastically since the early days.

With all that said, the number of success stories that are coming out of
RubyMotion has my attention (especially 37Signals). I will most certainly
consider RubyMotion for any upcoming pet projets. I still won't use it in my
business since you need someone versed in Ruby and partially in iOS, so until
I have more developers with that skillset it's not worth going with something
so esoteric since developers are so hard to come by as is.

------
nirvanatikku
"I took an iOS class last year and got completely intimidated by Objective-C.
It felt like I had to write a lot of code to do simple things and in my mind’s
eye any potential app idea I would want to work on was getting crushed before
I could even take it seriously."

I want to call out this particular line: "It felt like I had to write a lot of
code to do simple things"

I dived into iOS development full on a couple of months back, and have to say,
after extensive experience dealing with Android, BlackBerry and PhoneGap.. the
iOS framework is phenomenal. I have found that more often than not you will
NOT have to write a lot of code to do simple things (the same may even apply
for seemingly complex things!).

It takes a little bit of getting used to, but after it all clicked, I feel
like an idiot for feeling intimidated at all. To those that feel intimidated
by the thought of iOS/Objective-C, I suggest diving in and giving it a shot. I
promise, you'll love it.

~~~
danneu
OP is lamenting about the Objective-C language verbosity/ceremony compared to
Ruby, not the Cocoa Touch framework.

After all, you're still using the same iOS framework with RubyMotion.

But you do get to use Ruby, and more interestingly you get to use rake and
Cocoa wrappers like BubbleWrap[1].

[1]: <https://github.com/rubymotion/BubbleWrap>

~~~
nirvanatikku
Fair point. I focused a bit too much on the framework itself, but I was really
trying to address the 'intimidating' nature of objective-c (as it relates to
getting things done in iOS). Certainly I can appreciate the verbosity in
comparison and I know where RubyMotion has it's place. Just saying for the
folks that are intimidated by objective-c (and have yet to give it a shot):
try not to be!

~~~
bora
My intimidation doesn't come from the difficulty of Objective-C but 1) The
time it takes to build iOS apps using Objective-C and 2) verboseness. I
explained above that I think it would take twice as long to build the same app
in Objective-C and that thought intimidates me as for most of us the apps
we're building are experiments. We don't know if it will catch on or not. And
I would like to see results as quickly as possible, especially in a
bootstrapped project like this.

