

Ask HN: Linux Development - Rapid Prototyping on the iPhone - buggy_code

Background: I've used Linux for 1+ decade. Familiar with vim/emacs (yes, I use both), gcc/g++, make, gdb; and recently into scheme.<p>Problems:
1) I find MacOSX GUI difficult to deal with (it's almost Unix, but not quite); XCode to be not nearly as nice as Emacs; and the Interace Builder + forced use of XCode quite unproductive.<p>2) I also want to see if there's a rapid way to write iPhone apps in Scheme or Ruby, rather than in Objective C [as nice as it's small talk like message passing is, I'm not a big fan of it.]<p>Others must have gone through this so:<p>1) What do you do on a Mac to make developing comfortable coming from a Linux background?<p>2) What secret programming language to you use, if any, to massively speed up iphone development?<p>Thanks!
======
frankus
Take a look at the nu programming language:

<http://programming.nu/>

It's an s-expression language built on top of the Objective-C runtime. I'm not
enough of an FP guru to tell you if it's a suitable stand-in for Scheme, but
it's written and working on the iPhone.

From the looks of it you can use any editor you want to write your .nu files
and they you load them at runtime with a small stub of Objective-C.

And there's also a Linux version.

------
haxorize
Take a look at Rhodes.

<http://www.rhomobile.com/>

Here's the pitch: "Rhodes is the industry's first open source framework for
rapidly building mobile applications for all major smartphone operating
systems. Rhodes allows developers to write a smartphone application once using
simple HTML and it automatically builds native applications for all
smartphones including iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and now
Android."

The framework is based in Ruby.

------
frankus
BTW, a lot of your emacs key bindings will work on a Mac (at least in Cocoa
apps), and you can add more. Here's an in-depth explanations:

[http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....](http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html)

But things like Control -Previous, -Next, -Back, -Forward, (forward) -Delete,
-A (beginning of line), -End of line, -Kill, -Yank, and -Transpose work out of
the box.

------
yan
1) I use XCode mostly and find it quite able. Recently, I got MacVim to be
XCode's text editor (double click on a file or on a build error -> opens in
MacVim) and it's very tolerable. I think MacVim is by far the best
implementation of Vim on OS X yet. You can use 'xcodebuild' from the shell and
live in vim/emacs entirely actually.

2) I actually happen to love Objective C. What's your issue with it?

------
asimjalis
I have been using MacVim and the Unix prompt for my dev environment, and it's
working well so far. XCode is useful for running code in the simulator, and
for the core library documentation. Here is a simple app I made using this set
up <http://pair.com/asim/itimeit>

------
hboon
1) Just do it. Check it out, use Objective C + Xcode + IB and get familiar
with the frameworks first. You can launch Emacs as an external code editor
working with Xcode.

2) Write part of the app as a web service.

