Re:PhoneGap vs RubyMotion
by anuraj on Monday June 04, 2012 @11:59AM
(#4064550)
I can understand PhoneGap will be handy when requiring cross platform compatibility and you are not a multi platform expert. The experience is always going to be underwhelming. RubyMotion is much more ambiguous, on one hand we have beautiful XCode and Objective-C environment which is a pleasure to use, and then this command line monstrosity! And it do not save you from learning cocoa libraries - So if you want to develop for iOS, try to use Apple tools - period.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Well, there are folks who don't find Xcode or Objective-C beautiful and prefer using the command-line. A lot of folks, actually. :)
Well - try developing a pixel perfect app on command line and see! And by the way Objective-C is the fastest growing language out there.
In my experience, the text-editor/command-line path is the only way to be truly "pixel perfect". Visual tools can get you most of the way there, but it seems you always inevitably have to touch the drawing code if you want true accuracy.
Oh, and as for Objective-C being a fast growing language? The rise of Objective-C is directly tied to the rise of the iOS platform. If iOS had been written in any other language, Objective-C would still be a mostly forgotten language today.
You can still use XCode's interface builder and use Storyboards and XIBs with RubyMotion. It's not as nicely coupled as it is with Objective-C, but again, RubyMotion is in its infancy and evolving rapidly.
I did. And by the way; irrelevant.
I would politely disagree. XCode is a beast of a program to learn and to maneuver, RubyMotion's command line interface is comparatively very simple with only a handful of commands. Coming from Ruby, it behaves like most things in that ecosystem, command line oriented and no IDEs, obviously if you're coming from XCode, it's going to feel foreign.
Further, I think learning Cocoa libraries in verbatim Objective-C is a only transient problem for the near-term. Efforts are already underway to abstract away some of that complexity but it's hard to be overly critical of a 5 week old project for not being mature.