Ask HN: Linux Development - Rapid Prototyping on the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Linux Development - Rapid Prototyping on the iPhone

6 pointsbuggy_code6 comments

Background: I've used Linux for 1+ decade. Familiar with vim/emacs (yes, I use both), gcc/g++, make, gdb; and recently into scheme.

Problems: 1) I find MacOSX GUI difficult to deal with (it's almost Unix, but not quite); XCode to be not nearly as nice as Emacs; and the Interace Builder + forced use of XCode quite unproductive.

2) I also want to see if there's a rapid way to write iPhone apps in Scheme or Ruby, rather than in Objective C [as nice as it's small talk like message passing is, I'm not a big fan of it.]

Others must have gone through this so:

1) What do you do on a Mac to make developing comfortable coming from a Linux background?

2) What secret programming language to you use, if any, to massively speed up iphone development?

Thanks!

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Take a look at the nu programming language:

http://programming.nu/

It's an s-expression language built on top of the Objective-C runtime. I'm not enough of an FP guru to tell you if it's a suitable stand-in for Scheme, but it's written and working on the iPhone.

From the looks of it you can use any editor you want to write your .nu files and they you load them at runtime with a small stub of Objective-C.

And there's also a Linux version.

Take a look at Rhodes.

http://www.rhomobile.com/

Here's the pitch: "Rhodes is the industry's first open source framework for rapidly building mobile applications for all major smartphone operating systems. Rhodes allows developers to write a smartphone application once using simple HTML and it automatically builds native applications for all smartphones including iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and now Android."

The framework is based in Ruby.

BTW, a lot of your emacs key bindings will work on a Mac (at least in Cocoa apps), and you can add more. Here's an in-depth explanations:

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....

But things like Control -Previous, -Next, -Back, -Forward, (forward) -Delete, -A (beginning of line), -End of line, -Kill, -Yank, and -Transpose work out of the box.

1) I use XCode mostly and find it quite able. Recently, I got MacVim to be XCode's text editor (double click on a file or on a build error -> opens in MacVim) and it's very tolerable. I think MacVim is by far the best implementation of Vim on OS X yet. You can use 'xcodebuild' from the shell and live in vim/emacs entirely actually.

2) I actually happen to love Objective C. What's your issue with it?

I have been using MacVim and the Unix prompt for my dev environment, and it's working well so far. XCode is useful for running code in the simulator, and for the core library documentation. Here is a simple app I made using this set up http://pair.com/asim/itimeit

1) Just do it. Check it out, use Objective C + Xcode + IB and get familiar with the frameworks first. You can launch Emacs as an external code editor working with Xcode.

2) Write part of the app as a web service.

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