Bonus Track

Thanks so much for putting this up for us.

This is a great introduction to MacRuby! I'd really like to see that screencast about HotCocoa too.

Thanks a lot for this great video. Inspired me to try Macruby out for prototyping by combining Objective-C and Ruby classes in the same project.

Blog post about the experience at: http://simply-hacking.org/macruby-support-in-any-cocoa-application.html

You could in fact already create Mac applications with RubyCocoa.

And I'm sorry to crash the party, but the current MacRuby release (0.4) is not at all “stable” enough to create real applications with…

Err, I meant: “You could in fact already create Mac applications with Ruby by using RubyCocoa.”

Eloy: Indeed, there are some gotchas that I hope get fixed in 0.5, but I haven't run into anything serious. I'd love to hear about the problems you're seeing, and I'm sure the MacRuby developers would as well. Perhaps you could post a blog with more details.

FIrst of all, I totally neglected to say that the screencast is really well done and a very welcome addition to the MacRuby landscape. So thanks a lot for that!

A bit about myself, although I don't deal much with the nitty gritty details yet (I work mainly on the rubyspecs), I am in fact a MacRuby developer ;-)

The issues we’ve encountered while porting a RubyCocoa application to MacRuby are well known and actively being worked on for the 0.5 release. And yes, that version will _definitely_ lay an even more solid foundation for the future. Although it should still be clear that it's still pre-1.0 software.

Which brings me to a better explanation of what it is that I actually wanted to bring across with my first message, albeit a bit too much to the point maybe. The being that I don't want people to get the wrong impression of MacRuby’s current state, because lots of work still has to be done and we don't want to loose userbase because of the wrong expectations.

So please, everybody use MacRuby and keep the feedback to the mailing list and on Trac coming! We appreciate the efforts greatly. But be aware that there are still issues which in some cases might be a good reason to still use RubyCocoa for the time being. Porting from RubyCocoa to MacRuby later on is not such a big problem, so the added “pain” won't hurt too much.
(Some of the issues can be found in the tests and known_bugs.rb file)

On the topic of writing a blog post about this, I'd love to. But frankly, writing a blog post always costs me much more time than I estimate upfront and I'd rather spend my spare time on helping out to get 0.5 into shape…

Finally, if people out there have spare time, wink wink, and would like to actively help out MacRuby, and other implementations(!); a very good place to start are the rubyspecs. For more information see: http://github.com/alloy/mr-experimental/blob/master/spec/README.rdoc

Keep up the good work!

Cheers,
Eloy

That will always happen, you take so much care to write a piece and yet still fail…

“The issues we’ve encountered while porting a RubyCocoa application to MacRuby are well known TO THE MACRUBY DEVELOPERS” is what it should have read, without the capitals.

Ok done now :-)

Eloy: Thanks for that background information. It really helps. I honestly didn't know you were a MacRuby developer. Thanks for continuing to make MacRuby better!

Mike,

thanks for creating this great tutorial. I wasn't aware, that the support for ruby is already THAT great. I love it. I'm basically in c# at work and do mac&iPhone-programming in my spare-time and I definately missed the powerfull ruby-one-liners (e.g. modifying specific elements in an array via a passed-in block)

Elroy,

thanks for all your efford into MacRuby! I really appreciate it. Keep up the good work!