I like rubymotion and looked very seriously at it for doing some prototyping/mvp work a few years back before we hired in house ios dev.
I think react-native has largely filled the niche that was there for rubymotion to fill and with the momentum of facebook and javascript behind it the days of new people coming to rubymotion are largely behind it.
It was a great idea and a great product/tool in its time, but it was outflanked by additional resources and circumstances.
Do you know of any good resources to play around with RubyMotion? I went through the quickstart for an Android app, seems pretty simple, but I am not too sure how I would structure an app or change views.
Ionic 1 seemed pretty straight forward to me and I haven't tried React Native.
You write Android apps the same way you'd write them in Java and the Android SDK but with the Ruby language. The quickstart gives you an idea of how to translate some of the Java to Ruby but you'll still need to learn how to build Android apps with Java.
I had the wrong understanding of how it worked (I come from a Rails/Javascript/Ruby background), so thank you for the explanation, it illuminates a lot.
redpotion seems to be the way to go, but that project seems to be in maintenance mode.
There are a few other libraries/frameworks from the rubymotion project itself, called motionflow iirc, that seemed like they were the way of the future when I checked out status a few months ago. However they were not finished at the time.
I bought a one year license earlier this year. It is nice being able to code in Ruby and using helper gems much the same code runs on macOS and iOS which is nice.
Swift looks like a nice language from the few hours I have spent playing with it, but I hope that RubyMotion as a company stays viable because for someone like me, who just dabbles in iOS and macOS development, RubyMotion is easier.
I did a prototype app with RubyMotion a couple of years back.
The iOS gems made getting an app out the door easy if you were already a Ruby developer. Android, not so much. The support for Android was still fresh. The APIs to interact with Android were there, but not very many gems for Android + RubyMotion at the time. However, there hasn't seemed to be much progress with RubyMotion + Android since then.
React Native was a good alternative and appeared to pick up more steam. Likely because of the rise of React. Since this targeted iOS and Android better, it was more exciting to put effort there.
As a Ruby developer, I'm excited to see what's to come! I'd love to give RubyMotion another chance.
I remember a few years back when Hypercritical revisited Copland 2010. RubyMotion looked like potential future, but Siracusa didn't believe in bridges.
Tried RubyMotion early, it was okay but required knowing both Ruby and Objective-C. With Swift, there's a similar pathology but it's a typed language, it's basically well-integrated and official.
I think react-native has largely filled the niche that was there for rubymotion to fill and with the momentum of facebook and javascript behind it the days of new people coming to rubymotion are largely behind it.
It was a great idea and a great product/tool in its time, but it was outflanked by additional resources and circumstances.