C4[3] Blitz Talks and MacRuby

I just came back from C4[3] - an Independent Mac and iPhone Developer Conference in Chicago. Wolf and Victoria host it and I saw Daniel Jalkut helping out along with a few other folks. In case you’re not hip to the zero numbering scheme, this is actually the 4th iteration of the conference. I went last year to C4[2] and this year was even better in my opinion.

There’s too many things to write about so I’ll just focus on two things that stick out in my mind: Blitz Talks and MacRuby.

I go to NSCoderNightDC and we have a nice core group of Mac and iPhone Devs who show up every week and eat Strawberry Napoleons. We also code and talk about design. Well 3 of the guys proposed Blitz Talks and got accepted.

Rob hit it out of the park with his Briefs iPhone prototyping tool. Jose actually created a Brief on the way from the airport to the hotel. He was kinda nervous beforehand in the hotel room but he practiced his presentation a few times on me and was really well prepared. His slides were top-notch but I think the idea is what really captivates people. I’m personally a big fan of fake-powered prototypes - prototypes powered by objects that return canned responses, but I’m definitely going to try out Briefs on upcoming iPhone engagements.

Jose did well with his presentation about the different types of contexts that an iPhone user would use different apps in. I’ve seen him give this talk before so it was interesting to see how he pared it down to fit in the much tighter 5 minute time frame.

Mark gave an interesting talk about how to do video right for Mac and iPhone screencasts and demos. I have a lot to learn about this and I’m hoping to work with Mark on a screencast sometime in the near future for Webnote.

There were many other Blitz Talks and I think they really were a nice Change of Pace that I haven’t seen in other conferences. Wolf amped it up even further by providing an animated radar / pie that kept filling up as the talk progressed.

MacRuby was the other big surprise for me. I had been tracking RubyCocoa and had seen the early MacRuby demo at RubyConf 2007. I’m a former Smalltalker and current Rubyist. I do all my automated build processes in Ruby and I’ve also created various non-Rails Ruby server-side components for clients. Plus I did Ruby on Rails for a few years. So I’ve been wanting to make Mac apps with Ruby, except one thing kept holding me back: I don’t want to show everyone my source.

Obfuscation is not a problem with server-side Ruby. The users only see what you expose via the web or other ports. They only see what’s rendered to them or the API that you expose.

Client-side Ruby is another world altogether. Users learn that they can peek inside application packages and if you’re writing Ruby, they can see your source. I’ve asked this question at WWDCs in the past and the answer was usually that its not a big deal and that you should just keep innovating. But we don’t just leave our Objective-C sources lying around, do we?

MacRuby will soon solve that, or I hope it will, with his AOT (Ahead Of Time) compiler. Or as it is known in the C/C++/Objective-C world: a compiler. LOL. So with the AOT, we will be able to write Cocoa apps in Ruby, compile them and run them on Mac. (And maybe iPhone - the jury is still out on that.) Which means that people can’t just look at your Ruby source. Even better, there is the HotCocoa project which provides useful macros / shortcuts for common Cocoa idioms.

Why use Ruby to write Cocoa apps? Ruby can be more concise, there are more libraries to choose from and the testing/mocking frameworks are better. On the other hand, the debugging story is still hazy.

I’ll be trying out MacRuby soon and I’ll post what I find. They’re currently at 0.4 with a 0.5 on the horizon, with nightlies for Snow Leopard available and the latest source available in both Subversion and Git. Buy Levitra Now
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