RoR to RubyMotion Writing Your First ios App With RubyMotion. Michael Denomy BostonMotion User Group June 25, 2013

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1 RoR to RubyMotion Writing Your First ios App With RubyMotion Michael Denomy BostonMotion User Group June 25, 2013

2 About Me Tech Lead at Cyrus Innovation - Agile web consultancy with offices in New York and Boston - Agile and XP practitioner since Passionate about TDD and pairing mdenomy on twitter and github Blog at

3 Goals Capture my experiences getting started with RubyMotion - Help someone else along - Get ideas for where to go next Target Audience - Developers familiar with Ruby on Rails - Little to no previous experience with ios - Desire to learn Some talk, some code

4 The Vision Ruby MVC

5 The Reality initwithnibname? UIControlEventTouchUpInside? What s a Nib?

6 More Cold Hard Facts RubyMotion is not free - $ No trial, but 30 day money back - There is a student discount program ios Developer Program is not free - $99 / year - Required to deploy to devices and distribute via AppStore You will need to understand ios SDK - ios documentation is difficult to navigate

7 It Gets Better

8 It Gets Better

9 Good Stuff Growing community with lots of online resources More and more gems appearing that provide a Rails-like experience Free to use the tools you like - Sublime plug in for RubyMotion has code completion and rake shortcuts SublimeRubyMotionBuilder

10 MVC in ios MVC is MVC right? No convention over configuration - Have to wire things up manually Slightly different terminology that Rails

11 UIViewControllers Controller receives actions from the framework (e.g. view loaded) and the user (e.g. button pressed) - Interacts with Models and View UIViewControllers you need to know - UINavigationController - UITabBarController - UIViewController - UITableViewController

12 Models Models are PORO s in RubyMotion Support built-in for - attr_accessor - attr_reader - attr_writer Possible to serialize/deserialize data using NSCoder and NSKeyedArchiver - Looked for other options to support storage and relationships

13 Views UIView is a base class Buttons, labels, date pickers, etc., all inherit from UIView Views can have subviews - Simplifies screen layout and allows re-use

14 Let s Look at Some Code Basic Navigation - Application Delegate - Root View Controller - UITabBarController - UIViewControllers

15 MyWines App I enjoy the occasional glass of wine. I would like to have a way to track the wines I like and prices I've paid for them - Record tasting notes - Record purchases and price info - Search for wine by name/producer - Save to Favorites - Save label picture Spoiler alert - I have done next to nothing to style the app

16 Sketch It Out It s a lot cheaper and faster to iterate at this level than in code

17 What Tools Did I Choose Bundler - Simplify dependencies Formotion - Entry/edit forms Teacup - Styling DSL Sugarcube - UI extensions ProMotion - Screen development and workflow MotionModel - Models and relations BubbleWrap - I used it for camera, but lots more (JSON, HTTP, RSS, Location, Audio, Video) MotionAwesome - Buttons and icons More at

18 ProMotion Simplifies screen development Support for table screens - Easily search for table entries Helpers for tab and navbar controllers

19 Formotion Easily create forms for entry/edit Integrates with ProMotion Support For - text - dates - sliders - check boxes - and many more

20 MotionModel Wanted something like ActiveRecord Chose MotionModel gem - Lightweight - Feels Railsy Validations ActiveRecord-like syntax Relations - Serialization / deserialization support - Actively maintained - Formotion support(turned out not to matter)

21 Teacup Layout and style your app in a DSL Frees you up from layout of screens in XCode Allows you to keep your views a lot cleaner Hierarchical and supports variables

22 Sugarcube Tons of helpful syntactic sugar extensions to make your development easier - conversion of hex color codes to UIColor - alert and action dialogs - symbol to ios, e.g., :touch.uicontrolevent becomes UIControlEventTouchUpInside - array helpers - hash to object conversions

23 BubbleWrap Amazing set of tools for - HTTP - JSON - RSS - Camera - Location - Alert boxes - REPL support Just using it for the camera in my app

24 MotionAwesome Great set of icons and buttons Based on FontAwesome So far only used it to create a camera button using a camera icon

25 Deploying to Device Must be in Apple Developer Program - $99/year Get provisioning and developer certificates Deploy using rake - rake device - Make sure to quit itunes and Image Capture Can t do some things with simulator - e.g. Camera

26 Where Do I Go Next Better use of views and subviews - As app evolves will have more common controls/groups -> re-use - Easier to lay out due to relative positioning used in subviews Better/more styling - Will require more understanding of ios Persist images to file system Do more with models - Averages, filtering, etc

27 Where Do I Go Next Testing - This was very much a spike, but as the app evolves want to incorporate more automated testing - Tested the models, especially persistence and validation since these were areas of risk - Want to look at more integration testing motion-frank (maintained by Cyrus Innovation) motion-calabash

28 Questions I Still Have ProMotion is awesome, but I wonder if down the road this paints me into a corner Wild West of gems - Will be interesting to see what ideas and tools rise to the top How much ios should I learn - Interface Builder - CoreData

29 Resources RubyMotion Developer Center - RubyMotion by Clay Allsop - ios Dev Center - Tons of useful info, navigation is horrible ViewControllerPGforiPhoneOS RubyMotion Wrappers and Libraries -

30 Questions Q&A

31 RoR to RubyMotion Writing Your First ios App Michael Denomy BostonMotion User Group June 25, 2013