Michael Denomy shares his experiences on developing iOS apps using RubyMotion, targeting Ruby on Rails developers new to iOS. He covers essential tools and libraries, such as Bundler, Promotion, Formotion, and MotionModel, while discussing the MVC architecture in iOS and the challenges of navigating the iOS SDK. Denomy emphasizes the importance of testing and further learning about iOS development as the app evolves.

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
- http://www.cyrusinnovation.com
• Agile and XP practitioner since 2004
- Passionate about TDD and pairing
• mdenomy on twitter and github
• Blog at www.mdenomy.wordpress.com

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
MVC
Ruby

5. The Reality initWithNibName?
UIControlEventTouchUpInside?
What’s a Nib?

6. More Cold Hard Facts
• RubyMotion is not free
- $199.99
- 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
https://github.com/haraken3/
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
• ProMotion - Screen development and workflow
• Formotion - Entry/edit forms
• MotionModel - Models and relations
• Teacup - Styling DSL
• Sugarcube - UI extensions
• BubbleWrap - I used it for camera, but lots more
(JSON, HTTP, RSS, Location, Audio, Video)
• MotionAwesome - Buttons and icons
More at http://rubymotion-wrappers.com/

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
- http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/
• RubyMotion by Clay Allsop
- http://pragprog.com/book/carubym/rubymotion
• iOS Dev Center
- Tons of useful info, navigation is horrible
- https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action
- https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/
ViewControllerPGforiPhoneOS
• RubyMotion Wrappers and Libraries
- http://rubymotion-wrappers.com/

30. Questions
• Q&A

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