Introducing ProMotion, a Full-Featured RubyMotion Application Framework

Introducing ProMotion, a Full-Featured RubyMotion Application Framework(blog.rubymotion.com)

84 points by markrickert 13 years ago | 25 comments

colinta 13 years ago |

I've never seen a better tool for rapid prototyping a working iOS app... and it plays nice with teacup, pixate, all the friends!

Reminds me somehow of Sinatra - e.g. Promotion : Cocoa :: Sinatra : Rails

evilduck 13 years ago | |

Don't be modest...Motion-Xray[1] is a pretty awesome prototyping tool as well.

[1] https://github.com/colinta/motion-xray

skram 13 years ago | |

"Sinatra for iOS dev" would literally be the answer to my dreams. I have a license for RubyMotion but havent had time to play with it. This looks very promising!

drpancake 13 years ago |

I'm on the fence about this and RubyMotion in general. By far the most time consuming part of app development is getting the visuals and animations looking right, and I don't see how this helps. The basic scaffolding (setting up view controllers, transitions and talking to the backend) is the easy bit.

On the other hand, I'm a Python guy and I've never fallen for Objective-C (although recent sugary additions have made it far more pleasant).

Can anyone who has made the jump enlighten me?

jballanc 13 years ago | |

Visuals and animations are infinitely easier to get "looking right" when you can modify parameters directly in a running app via REPL. That's possible with RubyMotion. In particular, check out https://github.com/rubymotion/sugarcube#repl-view-adjustment... .

cnp 13 years ago | | |

I second this. I demoed the Sugarcube repl for our mobile team (I'm primarily a JavaScript dev who has fallen in love with RM) and everyone was universally blown away. It's the most useful thing ever -- well that, combined with Teacup.

intropic 13 years ago |

This looks like it could be the thing that tips me over into buying RubyMotion. Well done guys.

stcredzero 13 years ago |

I hope this isn't Metrowerks CodeWarrior all over again. Hopefully, there won't develop a significant "underclass" of developers who simply won't venture away from the parts of iOS that haven't been given a "Ruby-like" facade. Right now, Apple has a wonderful situation where over 90% of the devs and users adopt the newest versions of the OS. They should hate to lose that.

(I am all for choice, though. I wish Apple had a way of "blessing" frameworks and languages that have automated and/or inherent ways of absorbing additions to iOS, and was specific about this.)

jamon51 13 years ago | |

There's pretty much nothing you can do in Objective-C that you can't in RubyMotion.

RubyMotion exposes 100% of the Objective-C runtime with virtually no performance penalty. They are very on top of new iOS releases (released full iOS 6 support within a week).

In fact, I think that the RubyMotion community adopts new iOS technologies faster since it's new and doesn't have a lot of legacy code.

stcredzero 13 years ago | | |

There is a significant difference between APIs that are named/structured in a Ruby-like way, and APIs that are named according to Objective-C/Smalltalk conventions. This can be a cause of significant pain. (For example, while refactoring, you have to search for all the ways a method could be called.)

RubyMotion is doing the right things. Much of the result also depends on community. It's a bad sign when supposedly smart programmers disdain a technology or a set of tech conventions simply because it's different. Especially when that tech has a great track record. It's really weird when they disdain the very thing they're building on. I've met some RubyMotion programmers like this, however. I hope they're just an aberration.

tvon 13 years ago | |

It would be great if Apple up and acquired RubyMotion. As it stands I'm hesitant to invest serious time in a system that isn't a first class citizen of the platform I'm building for, especially since there are things I actually like about Objective-C (despite coming from a Ruby and Python background).

I'm only a few days into using RubyMotion so I haven't formed a complete opinion yet, but my current concern is that I will end up becoming skilled at using a set of gems instead of becoming skilled at using the platform.

drivingmenuts 13 years ago |

So, where I'm getting a bit confused is the difference between RubyMotion and MacRuby. I gather it's a superset of MacRuby functionality? Having a "stupid day".

I'm wanting (aiming toward needing) to learn Ruby but trying to justify the cost without actually knowing the language is a bit tough.

aaronbrethorst 13 years ago | |

MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 built on top of Cocoa. It's also OS X-only. See http://macruby.org

RubyMotion is fully compiled, and built on top of LLVM. See http://www.rubymotion.com/features/

chc 13 years ago | | |

They are both compiled and built on top of LLVM. RubyMotion is a fork of MacRuby, not a different design.

deedubaya 13 years ago | |

RubyMotion is derived from MacRuby. MacRuby hasn't seen much development in some time, I would recommend investing your time in RubyMotion instead.

You can learn Ruby for free; you don't need RubyMotion or any other paid software for that.

tvon 13 years ago | |

FWIW there is a 30 day money back guarantee for Ruby Motion (which my company may make use of if we decide to stick with Objective-C).

jlarocco 13 years ago | |

I'm not following this at all. Justify the cost of what? There's no cost to learn Ruby.

markrickert 13 years ago | | |

He's talking about the cost of RubyMotion - $200

auston 13 years ago |

This is really awesome, so awesome that I'd like to pay for it!

markrickert 13 years ago | |

https://www.gittip.com/jamonholmgren/

mark_l_watson 13 years ago |

I know it is early days for RubyMotion's OSX development support, but I will ask anyway: anything like ProMotion for the OSX side of the house?

CallRed 13 years ago |

Trying it out now and it seems pretty awesome. Does anyone know of a great tutorial about connecting a new RubyMotion app to an existing ruby app?

kcbanner 13 years ago |

Unfortunate choice of name: http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php

evilduck 13 years ago | |

Different industries, full featured desktop application vs. a software library. Windows software sold as a package versus a free development library for iOS that only runs on Macs.

I don't see there being much trademark confusion here.