Ruby on OS X Conference Videos
How I built LimeChat by Satoshi Nakagawa
LimeChat is a very popular IRC client built with RubyCocoa. It’s fast, stable, and it’s easy to write themes using CSS or YAML. Based on his experience, Satoshi will give you practical advice for building real-world applications with RubyCocoa.
Introduction to HotCocoa by Rich Kilmer
HotCocoa is a thin Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks. It simplifies the verbose OS X API so that you can programmatically construct user interfaces without Interface Builder. This works by creating a mapping layer on top of the Objective-C classes. HotCocoa adds Ruby-friendly methods, constants and delegate techniques that look refreshingly simple, but do not prevent full access to the Cocoa APIs. Rich will demonstrate the current state of HotCocoa, show you how to use it to construct full OS X applications quickly, and what the plans are for the future.
Introduction to Rucola by Eloy Duran
Cocoa development can seem cumbersome if you come from a Ruby background, especially where you need to deal with XCode. Rucola makes it easy to follow conventions for application layout by providing generators, offers rake tasks for common jobs, and gives you various other handy helpers. Eloy will tell you about the philosophy of Rucola and walk you through the development of a simple Cocoa application using Rucola.
Building games with MacRuby and OpenGL by John Shea
MacRuby allows you to write graphics intensive applications in Ruby because of the close integration with Cocoa. This makes it surprisingly easy to write games in Ruby, especially when you abstract a lot of the plumbing often needed in game development. John will cover the challenges of using OpenGL, discuss how to build game development tools such as level builders, and present a case study of how he built a side scrolling car game.
Testing Cocoa applications with Ruby by Manfred Stienstra
Even though automated testing has become very popular, it has never really taken off with people building GUI applications. There are probably two major reasons why GUI developers don’t write automated tests. First, writing tests in a traditional compiled language like C is cumbersome, and secondly, a GUI application is less straightforward to test than a library or a web application. Using RubyCocoa and MacRuby makes testing a lot easier. Not only for applications written in Ruby, but also for regular Cocoa applications written in Objective-C. Manfred will walk you through the development of a small Cocoa application and show how you can test the various parts.
Experiences from PyObjC by Koen Bok
Sofa shipped the first version of Checkout, their point-of-sale application for the Mac, in 2006. Checkout is written in Python using the PyObjC bridge to interface with Cocoa. Koen will talk about what’s needed to create a great desktop experience on the Mac and share his experiences with building and shipping a commercial Cocoa application that’s written in an interpreted language.
Showing off RubyStein 3D and Gosu by Ninh Bui & Julian Raschke
Instead of using regular slideware for their RailsConf presentation, Ninh and Hongli decided to write their own Wolfenstein-style raycaster in Ruby using the Gosu game development library. Gosu has been used for cross-platform, indie game development in Ruby for about five years now. Ninh will demonstrate RubyStein 3D and talk about why and how they built it. After that, Julian will briefly present the Gosu library and its design philosophy. He hopes to convince you to write a game over the next rainy weekend.