Glad you like it! We spent all weekend hacking away on this - really excited to show it to everyone.
Behind the scenes we're running iOS apps on Macs and streaming the screen to you - sort of like a remote-desktop connection into a running app. We've built up a bunch of infrastructure to do that for our main product.
To make the RubyMotion REPL magic happen, we looked at the how RubyMotion launcher worked. RubyMotion apps expose the REPL over a UNIX socket, and you can write expressions and read results from there. So, we connect into that.
If anyone is curious, here's a DTrace script for peeking at the traffic going over the RubyMotion REPL socket: https://gist.github.com/2624774
This is actually really cool for other things than RubyMotion. The biggest drawback of having to pay for frameworks and development toolkits is that you cannot easily test drive them (the reason I am a fan of the free-for-personal GPL/BSD + commercial license model). This potentially takes away some of those concerns.
Yep, I have a friend that has send them an email (using his uni email address) for a few days now. Apparently no answer ... Hope they are gona improve the feedback.
On the other hand on RubyMotion Google's group you can get an answer directly from Laurent Sansonetti if you have questions.
Oh, news on this actually. They just posted this on their blog about a half hour ago:
Educational Licenses
We have had many inquiries for educational licenses. We are extremely excited that students are being drawn to RubyMotion.
"If you sent us a request for an educational license, please accept our apologies for the late response. We will start contacting you early next week. Your emails have not been lost!"
