It is now official: I have traded my freedom & home office for a job title, an Aeron chair in a cubicle and a 401K. I received my new employee package and, in less than a week, I will officially become a full-time employee at SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America). I’m going to work in the PlayS...

After going through two betas, MacRuby 0.5 final is now released and can be downloaded by clicking on the icon below: MacRuby 0.5 Don’t worry about having MacRuby and Ruby 1.8.x or 1.9 installed, MacRuby is namespaced and won’t affect your current Ruby installations, just download and launch the ins...

Over the weekend, MacRuby’s trunk became version 0.6 and the bug fixing is currently done in both the 0.5 branch and trunk. Based on MacRuby’s usual release cycle I would expect a 0.5 beta3 or 0.5 final to be released soon so most of the work can be focused on trunk. I’ll let you check on the TODO l...

Since Mac OS X v10.5, Apple added a technology called Scripting Bridge which allows to control and communicate with scriptable applications such as Mail, iChat or iTunes. A few weeks back, I showed how to control iChat with MacRuby. This time I’m going to show you how to control iTunes. Here is a sm...

For Noël, my wife got me a new toy: the Amazon Kindle 2. Kindle vs Nook Before my wife bought what became my new favorite gadget, we checked on the Barnes & Noble Nook. The primary problem with the Nook was that it was out of stock. That pushed me to dig deeper and really compare both devices. The N...

Here is the geekiest way I found to wish Happy New Year to my IM contacts: framework 'ScriptingBridge' app = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier("com.apple.iChat") original_status = app.statusMessage new_year = Time.mktime(2010, 1, 1, 0, 0) loop do now = Time.now time_left = (new_year - no...

To be ready for 2010, I’m taking some time off relaxing and spending time with my family in Florida. During my free time, I’ve been reading, catching up on movies and TV shows and worked on the MacRuby book that I am writing for O’Reilly. I wrote a bunch of small apps, played with various APIs and e...

If you were at RubyConf 2009 or looked at the schedule, you saw that the big thing happening in the Ruby scene is the maturation of a many of the Ruby implementations: BlueRuby, HotRuby, IronRuby, JRuby, MacRuby, Maglev, MRI, REE, Rubinius, SmallRuby… Ruby developers really have plenty of choice whe...

During RubyConf 2009 in San Francisco, CA Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled Writing 2D games for the OSX platform in Ruby. ##Description of the talk: Are you a developer who would love to get into video games but get scared when he hears “OpenGL” or “rendering engines”? Or Maybe, you never conside...

[caption id=“attachment_638” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi”][/caption] My recent ‘Ruby revolution being over’ blog post generated quite a lot of comments. Let’s be honest, I did not expect less from the readers. However, I noticed three types of reactions I would...

According to wikipedia, a revolution (from the latin revolutio, “a turn around”) is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time. Somehow, I believe this is exactly what Ruby has done in the programming world, especially with the he...

This is yet another pretty simple tip. Use case: let say you want your applications users to choose one or multiple files or folder on their file system. A good example would be that you want the user to choose a file to process or a folder where to save some data. In the example above, I added a br...

During Rails Summit2009 in São Paulo, Brazil Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled The future of Ruby and Rails. ##Description of the talk: Plans for Rails 3 and tour of the various Ruby implementations. ##Slides ##Video The video of this talk is available here. ##Blog post I have had the opportunity ...

If you are writing any type of games you might want your users to interact with your application using their keyboards. This is actually not that hard. The approach is simple and fast forward if you are used to Cocoa. Everything starts in Interface Builder, add a custom view instance to your window....

Good news everyone! MacRuby beta 1 has been released! Official announcement here. [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“144” caption=“Download MacRuby 0.5 beta1”][/caption] Note that the download is only for SnowLeopard, intel machines. Lots of great stuff in this new release, the first one base...

Let say you want to release your MacRuby app and use a custom embedded font? You probably don’t want to force your users to install the font. Well, don’t worry, just put the font file in your resources folder and use the following code: font_location = NSBundle.mainBundle.pathForResource('MyCustomFo...

Let’s say you would like to play an audio file in your MacRuby app/script, how would you do? It’s actually pretty simple, you just need to use NSSound. If we wanted to use a system sound we could do: NSSound.soundNamed('Basso').play But let’s look at a more advanced example with some Cocoa patterns....

Laurent just posted a MacRuby status update on the mailing list and the first official beta of MacRuby 0.5 should be released pretty soon. Let’s quickly look at Laurent’s report: Early backtracing support. Much better AOT compilation. Parts of the standard library are now pre-compiled for testing. M...

I had people asking me how come I was not blogging as much lately. Well, on top of being really busy, I have been blogging on other blogs such as the official Rails blog. There aren’t a lot of Merb news, we are waiting for Carl and Yehuda to sign out on the 1.1 release and will hopefully soon start ...

Over the weekend, I spent some time working on a Ruby + Rack +CouchDB project. Three technologies that I know quite well but that I never put to work together at the same time, at least not directly. Let’s call this Part I. Before we get started, let me introduce each component: Ruby : if you are re...

CouchDB is an awesome technology. I’m lucky enough to work on quite a big project where we decided to switch from MySQL to Couch for various reasons. One of the many things I like with Couch is that it handles attachments and can replicate them as well as serve them for you using the Erlang based bu...

To celebrate the amazing work being done by Laurent Sansonetti on MacRuby here is a hello world using the new LLVM based compiler. $ echo "p ARGV.join(' ').upcase" > hello_world.rb $ macrubyc hello_world.rb -o macruby_says $ ./macruby_says hello world "HELLO WORLD" Note that to achieve this result, ...

What’s MacRuby? MacRuby is an Apple-sponsored, open source, full Ruby implementation on top of Objective-C runtime. In other words, whatever code runs on Ruby 1.9, should/will run on MacRuby. Yes, you read correctly, MacRuby can/will be able to run all your Ruby code. That means that eventually you ...

The other night, during our monthly SDRuby meetup, lots of people were very interested in learning more about CouchDB and Ruby. I tried to show what Couch was all about but I didn’t have time to show how to use CouchDB with Ruby. Here is me trying to do that in 10 minutes or less. I’ll assume you do...

During RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled Rails 3: Stepping off of the golden path. ##Description of the talk: Back in December 2008, the Rails and Merb core teams surprised everybody by deciding to merge their teams and focus their energy on a common release: Ra...

We made the decision to slightly delay the release of Merb 1.1 as we ended up changing the scope of what we wanted to make available in the 1.1 release. If you have been following our releases, you know that this is not something we usually do, but we strongly believe that this is actually something...

Following the DataMapper 0.9.11 release, we just pushed a new minor Merb release. This release is mainly targeting new developers and Windows users wanting to install the full Merb stack. Others can simply update their dependencies if they use the dependencies.rb file or install the new gems if noth...

We just pushed a really tiny update because of a bug in 1.0.9 affecting people using: Merb::Config[:max_memory] Merb::Config[:max_memory] has been fixed and now polls for memory usage every 30s instead of 0.25s. (memory is set in KB) This new version also uses DataMapper.repository instead of Kernel...

Yesterday, Carl Lerche, Yehuda Katz and myself had a meeting to discuss Merb 1.1’s roadmap. Key items on the agenda were: Ruby 1.9 Mountable apps migration path to Rails3 After spending some time arguing back and forth, we decided that few things had to happen before we could migrate the current sli...