Ruby Cocoa
You know that confused feeling you get when you think you said something innocent and a a little bit funny only to see that look on the other person's face. You know the look. The one that says, "um, you know what you said wasn't really funny at all." But, you know what you were trying to say and it was, at least a bit. Unfortunately, the other person can't read your mind and then you've got to figure out what to say next.
We had one of those moments today while releasing our latest Mac book at the Pragmatic Programmers (our books are distributed by O'Reilly Media to fine bookstores near you). We released the beta of Brian Marick's Ruby Cocoa book today and, in the process of trying to be a bit funny, offended people without meaning to.
Here's what we were trying to say. "We love Ruby. We love programming our Mac. Now you can get two great taste treats together and use Ruby to program your Mac. Putting the two together is like combining chocolate and peanut butter."
Unfortunately, here's what some traditional Mac developers thought we were saying. "We love Ruby. We love using our Mac. We know better than you do so we're going to show you how you should be programming for the Mac using this language and not the one you've used successfully for years."
That's not at all what we meant. We actually love Objective-C. In fact, it's because Objective-C and Ruby are both highly dynamic languages that Ruby Cocoa works so well. We weren't going to say this yet, but what the heck. We have a book coming up all about Objective-C 2.0. And there's even more Mac developer titles in the works, a half dozen in all. It's an expansion from the Ruby books that we are best known for and the Ruby Cocoa book seems like a natural book to bridge these two worlds. A great way to show the world how well chocolate and peanut butter go together.
We're sorry it didn't come out that way, but that's what we meant. Stay tuned. There's lots of sweet stuff coming.
Categories
Mac
Comments (4)
Read More Entries by Daniel H. Steinberg.
The too-flippant wording was my (the author's) fault. Sorry about that.
After the failure of Cocoa-Java to catch on (some who used it might say "the failure of Cocoa-Java to actually work"), I was surprised to see Cocoa get Ruby and Python bindings in Leopard, and I'm eager to see what the results are like. Does it work well, and are people adopting it?
I can sort of see the case being made that these could effectively be OS X's equivalent to Visual Basic: a very nice visual GUI builder (Interface Builder) and an approachable scripting language for the app logic. But Python and Ruby also seem advanced enough, that I wonder if there's really than many people that would want or need to use those languages instead of just going all the way to Obj-C. It wouldn't be surprising to see these bindings succeed wildly or fail miserably... it would sort of make sense either way.
Nice to see a book on the topic. The world needs deeper Mac developer titles.
Dave:
In both cases you continue to get updates to the PDF for the lifetime of that edition (that is, through beta an on through subsequent errata updates).
As for annotations—we don't disable them, as we explicitly have no technical restrictions on our PDFs. Some PDF readers seem to annotate our PDFs fine, while other don't. If annotations are somehow disabled, it isn't intentional on our part. If you find a problem, contact us and we can try to find a pattern.
Dave Thomas
From how the text reads, it sounds like if you buy the PDF now, you get the Beta PDF + subsequent betas & the final version. But if you buy the PDF+Paperback, you just get the current beta PDF, and then get the final book when it is printed [ie, no further revisions of the PDF].
And are the PDF's enabled for annotations?