RubyMotion & Rails Responders at the Canberra Ruby Crew

This week the Canberra Ruby Crew meetings kicked off again after a long hiatus. Both Hugh and I gave presentations. Hugh spoke about our use of Rails responders for tidily offering layout-less content intended for display in modal popup windows. You won’t see his slides online just yet, but his use of Impress.js with the demos embedded in iframes was ingenious.

I gave an introduction to RubyMotion, the impressive new Ruby implementation for developing iOS apps:

I’ve played with all the other half-arsed attempts at bridging different languages or web tech with native iOS deployment, and none of them has left me convinced. RubyMotion is different. It feels first-class, and in its brief couple of months since release, so many libraries have sprung up that look to make iOS development much more pleasant. I’m convinced enough that I’ll be porting Decaf Sucks across. I’ll let you know how it goes.

If you’re interested in learning RubyMotion, here are some resources worth checking out:

• Free screencast from The Pragmatic Studio
• The repository of example apps
• The examples from iOS Programming Big Nerd Ranch 3rd ed, ported to RubyMotion
• A long list of open source RubyMotion projects (and another here)

Many thanks to Hugh and Matthew for organising this month’s meet. If you’re interested in coming along next time, join the mailing list and follow @rubyaustralia on Twitter. See you then!