30yo. Grew up on a small farm in rural Illinois. Studied Physics / Math at a no-name liberal arts school in the Midwest. Got a job as a programmer out of school working for Sears Portrait Studio (no lie). Wrote a piece of OSS software over Thanksgiving break 2012 that front-paged on HN. Major tech co reached out the following week. Got the job, moved to SF, etc. I now work for a fairly well-known startup, living 'the dream.' Incredibly thankful for the opportunities that I've had.
At face value, I like the idea of RubyMotion, but I can't help but feel like it's a crutch to avoid picking up a few subtleties in Objective-C. The article even points out that RubyMotion doesn't hide much of the API from you, so in some ways it feels like 6 in one hand, half a dozen in the other. I'm not trying to be a naysayer, but I don't think the barrier to entry is as high as some make out to be.
Call it my crutch, but I got an app shipped without having to worry about a lot of the baggage that comes with Objective-C as a language. Here's two of my favorite examples of things I didn't have to worry about:
You're definitely right — nil / NSNull is confusing to newbies, but Ruby is just as bad. The way it handles UTF8 is somewhat backwards, and the fact that symbols and strings are different (but sometimes used interchangeably) can cause 'gotchas' for newbies too. I'd argue that your language of choice is really dependent on which set of baggage you've internalized :-)
RubyMotion is a huge win for me because of the super low friction toolchain. I don't ever have to load XCode and I can automate the build process however I like because it's all command-line based.
I was convinced the moment I checked out https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples and just started typing 'rake' in each directory not ever having to setup directory paths for xcode project settings.
The bigger reason to use RubyMotion is not a different syntax - you do end up using very similar code anyway, although lack of header files is a nice thing - but different tools. Objective-C is not the barrier. Xcode is.
After many attempts at getting started with Xcode and Objective-C had fizzled...it was an absolute joy trying RubyMotion and getting setup as an iOS Developer last night.
I can't wait to learn more, and it's wonderful being able to develop in Sublime, use RubyGems, Git, etc.
I keep some UIColor categories around so at least I can have prettier colours for debugging. It would be nice to make a variant of the method that (somewhat randomly) colours all views and logs the usual info + the colour out to the console.
This wouldn't be a difficult enhancement. I'd probably add some sort of enum to indicate what edge the bar should be along. Some of the view layout logic would obviously need to change, namely the glow effect would need to rotate and reposition based on what position the bar was in (not a difficult thing, of course). This is not necessarily a high priority for me right now (I'd like to add some customization API for look and feel in the near term).
An optional swipe-to-hide/reveal feature is something I was planning on implementing. Look for that soon!
If you are currently "manually testing in the simulator," don't forget that there are existing automated solutions for UI testing in iOS, including KIF (mentioned above) and Apple's own UIAutomation.
I've actually written a small framework for UIAutomation to make it less cumbersome, if that's a factor in adopting UIAutomation: http://www.github.com/jaykz52/mechanic
I posted an item yesterday to try out the service, but noticed that it was including a link to a zoomed in map hovering right over my house in the post (the same map is included in the "yardsale" version of the post). I'm a little cautious about posting my location/address on a site like CL (though I use the site frequently).
I promptly deleted the post and notified the ryan of my concerns; he promptly replied to my email and mentioned that he "fuzzed" my location details so that my perceived location was not so pinpointed. I haven't reposted anything to verify, though.
Here's a gist of the auto-gened CL post:
The title is essentially an ellipsis'ed version of your yardsale post (it cuts off at some character count, not sure the exact number). It uses the price you set as the CL price. Here's the post body:
"Hey everyone, I've got a [your yardsale post auto-inserted here]
Interested? Get in touch <shortened link to yardsale post>here</link>
<another yardsale link>View All Images</link> / <link to map>show map</link>
Posted with <link to Yardsale homepage>Yardsale</link> (free!). lovingly made in San Francisco.
