RubyMotion - free starter addition

Ruby Chat
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I reckon loads more will start playing with it now :slight_smile:

We are happy to introduce RubyMotion Starter, a fully-featured version of RubyMotion, available for free. Download it today!

RubyMotion Starter comes with full support for iOS and Android development. You can call into the entire set of public APIs, test locally on your machine and your devices, and submit to the respective app stores.

As with the other versions of RubyMotion, Starter will statically compile your Ruby code into optimized machine code, and let you use 3rd-party libraries, with CocoaPods on iOS and Gradle on Android.

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good move on their behalf. The ‘paid’ bit always puts people off to begin with.

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Yeah this way people can build an app, and if it works out as planned, buy RM to remove the splash screen :slight_smile:

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This is great! There are just a few questions/things I’d want to see:

  • Could the starter edition support all of the same mobile operating system versions that the Indie and Professional levels provide? Developers wouldn’t want to invest a lot of time developing and then upgrade the OS on their phone or have to get a new phone and be dead in the water for testing. Similarly, developers wouldn’t be able to try RubyMotion without having the right version of each OS on their phone.

  • Could the Starter Edition text be moved up under RubyMotion in the splash screen, maybe smaller and in all caps or similar? The current splash screen makes it look like it might be the starter edition of the application rather than RubyMotion.

  • How long will the splash screen be displayed? I would hope it wouldn’t be too long, so that developers don’t have to wait if for some reason they need to restart/redeploy the app a lot during development.

Thanks for making RubyMotion Starter Edition free!

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Good points Gary - I think just having ‘Made with RubyMotion’ makes better sense, or as you say put ‘starter edition’ closer (though personally I don’t think it is needed - drawing attention to RM is key imo).

Regarding developlment, you would probably use the simulator most of the time :slight_smile:

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Removing the Starter Edition from the splash or just moving it up some would be great!

There are different abilities of the phone, different CPUs (some much slower), different screen sizes and resolutions, etc. and the OS version can make a big difference, so serious developers will test on multiple devices and with multiple versions of the OS. It’s definitely helpful to use a simulator during development, but if you limit to only a single version of the OS for iOS and Android, you might as well just not allow any deployment to devices, because you will have more complaints about the problems I described, e.g. “I upgraded my OS/phone and now I can’t use my app,” etc.

I’m looking forward to trying out RubyMotion, though, even if only in the simulator!

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