iOS (for iPhone 5.1+) development in Ruby

I became interested in starting this "Cross-mobile-platform" project and writing about it because I found out there are very interesting events/incidents/and on-going news behind this interest.

What is the motivation for doing this: well, simply to go against the popular crowd and common understanding of you can't development some platform-specific program/application unless you have that actual hardware.  And yes, the specific platform of interest is this: Mac, iPhone, iOS.

I found it very ridiculous of Mac's background.  68000 68HC11, PowerPC chip (legacy now, but feel free to Google PowerPC and read the story behind it).  I am so surprised at what I encountered (CPU not supported on Guest OS) when I want to virtualize a recent MacOS (X, mountain lion, or lion).   But anyway, I stopped trying anyway because my recent Desktop is an AMD-based (but I wouldn't try it on my laptop because I feel it's too slow).

I like to use pictures to tell stories (pretty much a trend with Facebook these days):

So here is one:

    Figure 2013-01-01 sample.jpg:  a RhoSimulator running on Windows 7.

    I used original size of the image so you can see better.

Rhodes or RhoMobile seems to have been acquired by Motorola recently. (Seems to be beginning of this year 2012; but on further search, RhoMobile's website has an article on Oct 13, 2011).  Anyway, it has been my interest when I was learning Ruby anyway to do such thing (yes, I get these strange thoughts from time to time...).     But anyway, I am kinda frustrated at the outcome of it because there are no Linux support.   So, if you want to develop for iPhone, you gotta have a Mac.  ( But then why should I first spent for a MacBookPro).  MacMini price seems to be better and more reasonable.

Anyways, my finding is that "Figure 2013-01-01" is producible only on windows version of Ruby. (yes, not cygwin, not linux, strange huh?)  However, one could get the RhoSimulator.zip's .exe running, but I had no luck with it running in Cygwin (error loop is what I get, and hacking its scripts doesn't get me anywhere because I seem to have found blocks of script that checks for the Windows version.

RubyMotion, on the other hand, has AppleStore App compliance and 100% native App advantage as advertised on their (RubyMotion.com)'s website.  It seems like a better choice for people who can adapt and use Objective-C / iOS SDK API.  I have found free API resources on Websites and Github looking into RubyMotion too.  (RubyMotion is not free though. As of writing, it's ~US$200 to get started; but I like it's movie introduction in Getting Started and it is definitely Ruby-friendly and vim-friendly.)

Conclusion:  for me, being able to develop iOS apps (or any mobile platform) in Ruby preferably on Linux using my favorite editors and environments (without paying so much)---that is something I crave for.  And I believe this craving could be the trend.  But at least for now, there is an option to develop iOS Apps (or Android using Rubuto) using Ruby.  That is amazing.