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Hey HN, we're really excited to announce Propeller. It's the absolute best tool for non-technical folks to build mobile apps for themselves or their businesses.

All of the other "app builder" tools are limited to prototyping UI or generate really subpar webview-based experiences. We're going to change that by letting you build fast, native apps and will store the data you care about.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Totally agree, and this applies to almost every creative endeavor I can think of. If you want to write a book, throw words on a page. If you want to start a company, launch an MVP and iterate fast. All things being equal, doing is better than not doing, and doing well is better than doing poorly.

If you're interested in this topic w.r.t software engineering, check out Michael Lopp's article in The Magazine about Stables and Volatiles[1]. Really good piece on how companies are composed of and need both Volatiles like The Kid who move fast and innovate, and Stables who clean up the mess and move the company towards profitability.

[1]: http://the-magazine.org/1/stables-and-volatiles

> So... bootstrapped companies can't be startups? What about a funded, B2B service that is bringing in millions in revenue, but only has two clients signed up?

I think the missed the "or" in "raised money, are bringing in substantial revenue, /or/ have a sizable active user base". Your B2B example is perfectly fine. And I think some of your other points are based on this misunderstanding, too.

By cruft I more literally meant the fact that MRI being interpreted means a hit on performance, not necessarily syntactical cruft. Perhaps I should have chosen my words differently :)

RubyMotion is aiming to be a more complete implementation of Ruby, and one of the core ideas of Ruby is "there's more than one way to do it." Whether you agree or disagree is outside the bounds of RubyMotion and maybe even Ruby IMO; ultimately, whether or not more techniques than scoping define_method are allowed is something that can and should be done a per-project basis.

Food for thought, I found this article detailing all the ways to add singleton methods, in varying levels of grokability: http://wowkhmer.com/2011/01/15/different-ways-to-define-sing...

This, and inevitable references to Braun, have no place in comparison with the Samsung trial. Samsung made competing products so similar to the effect, and indeed with the purpose, of confusing consumers.

The recent rise in Apple bashing and calls of hypocrisy is even stranger in historical context[1]. Perhaps more of us should try and empathize with Apple's situation and history before passing fashionable judgement.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_v._Microsoft

Yes! RubyMotion ships with a port of Bacon, which removes all the friction from testing in the traditional iOS stack (setting up Xcode, adding multiple targets, verbosity...). Just have to add tests in ./specs and run 'rake spec'

Glance at the docs, especially the section about testing views. Much cleaner API than anything in Objective-C: http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/articles/testing/

(also a recent blog post on testing if you're still curious: http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/26489000626/functional-view-...)

Ah definitely, done. Thanks!

It's a library for RubyMotion http://RubyMotion.com

Very interesting that they didn't mention James Proud's Giglocator exit. Maybe they didn't reach out/he decided not to participate in this article, but if you're going for the revenue angle then it should be noted[1]

There are also two fellows in YC right now and are literally days from launching their startups.

(disclosure: I'm a Thiel Fellow)

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/06/20/skip-school-s...

For images you can use markdown to embed the image (i.e. `` )

Multiple examples in this PR: https://github.com/clayallsopp/formotion/pull/24

RubyMotion's updated very often (at least weekly) and supported the first iOS6 beta within a day of its release. That expedience could change in the future, but I don't see it being something to worry about.

Nope, developed it totally independently according to my needs.

Ha, I actually wrote something really similar (without knowing about QD) for RubyMotion: https://github.com/clayallsopp/formotion

Ruby is better suited to this IMO (no clunky file loading), but I agree they both prove dynamic native views need more exploration

I think RubyMotion proves that alternative languages don't need to come at a cost to performance. It's tougher to write a custom compiler like RM uses, but the end result is identical performance to normal Objective-C. "Just" write a similar compiler for Android/Dalvik and you're there ;)

I think you might've misinterpreted what I meant? I didn't mean to imply anything about the growth of iOS or that ObjC being just perceived as an easier language because of the growth. I trying to say that Objective-C was really criticized for its verbosity and forcing manual memory management, and Apple has made changes in direct response to those with ARC and more concise literals, which IMO makes it "easier" (espc. wrt ARC)

Looks like it has "letter-spacing: -1px" applied

Totally agree with that, but RubyMotion is more than just the Ruby language. There's no heavy IDE, no complex target/build setup, comes with a lightweight test environment, an interactive REPL...all that adds up to remove a lot of pain in the existing iOS workflow. You can definitely be proficient with the existing tools but I think RM is a lot better for newcomers.

There are some problems (debugging isn't great right now, memory bugs happen if you do tricky things), but it's only a few months old and I'm confident it'll get better over time.

I can't tell if Rhodes creates 100% native apps or some kind of web/native hybrids, but it doesn't like it uses Apple's iOS SDK. RubyMotion lets you use the same APIs and classes as normal Objective-C apps, so all existing literature is totally useable.

And something I didn't mention in the tutorial: you can even use existing Objective-C frameworks and code in RubyMotion apps using CocoaPods[1].

[1]: http://cocoapods.org/

Yup, from the video it looks like a totally custom front-end. Sort of like an Xbox/Metro interface, no Android chrome whatsoever.

Usually when someone describes a new product as "the same as x through y while z", it means the new thing is solving a pain point. Like, "isn't Heroku just git hosted on AWS which runs a Rails server after a push?"

The process you're describing is definitely workable and some games take advantage of it, but the Ouya focuses solely on making the experience of playing and downloading games painless. Whether or not they'll succeed is a different argument, but the Kickstarter proves that there's demand for such a product.

I think the value add of a `when` style isn't saving keystrokes but improving readability. What happens when the event fires is right there in-line with the button, not somewhere else on the page. Yeah there are editor tricks to command+click to it and such, but that's still some overhead.

TBH I think it really is a matter of preference at this point. There could be a killer, must-use RubyMotion framework in the future, but for now I simply feel more productive and flexible in Ruby.

In fact, the most impactful change of RubyMotion (and I somehow neglected this when I wrote it) is testing. It ships with a really powerful port of Bacon which is lightyears better than UIAutomation, KIF, and every other iOS testing framework I've tried. `rake spec` is a seamless, regular part of my workflow in a way that Xcode failed to achieve.

Definitely. I know RubyMotion currently supports XIBs and Storyboards, but yeah there's no integrated solution with Xcode or Instruments right now. I personally like the Rake-based approach, its more lightweight than booting up an IDE, but I would bet that better Xcode support is possible since MacRuby already does it pretty well.

It's because of a media query that responds to wider window sizes, strange that it didn't register in all your browsers (it does on my Safari when I fullscreen)

It's supposed to help readability while maximizing screen use in those cases (instead of either stretching out paragraphs to two lines or centering the body as to take up only a small percentage of the window). I'll change it to trigger on a wider dimension, sorry!

Sorry, should have specified! As jballanc said, I was referring to MacRuby (http://macruby.org/). I'll add a link there for clarification.

RM and MR are both by Laurent Sansonetti, and the experience developing for them is identical. The Ruby code is just as portable as Objective-C between iOS and OS X. I'm working on something right now which uses both technologies and it's been a great experience.

My side project http://AskMeEvery.com helps with personal data tracking. It asks you a question of your choice (ie how many phone calls did I have, how many commits, anything) every day and graphs your responses over time. Might be useful if you're interested in this.

A constant bottom bar would take up screen real-estate reserved for the feed, which is where most of the user's time will be spent (mostly consume vs create content)

And even if there was a bottom bar, Path offers 6 different posting options. Putting all of them on one bar, or hiding them somehow with a slider, would make it seem awfully crowded.

Thanks! Hope it's helpful for you! If you have any questions or suggestions let me know. Got some cool features planned, so stay tuned :)

Login and check your account, you can choose the time in hourly intervals. By default it'll start at the nearest hour after when you signed up.

Hey HN, this is a side project I've been working on for a bit. I've always wanted to keep track of daily data (things like sleep, weight, calories), but it's always been the kind of the thing where I do it for a week then I slowly start to forget. I made this to keep pushing me to enter new data. Hope you like it, I'd love your feedback!