Question

Ruby Motion just came out, and the screencast doesn’t seem to say anything about whether or not you can use Interface Builder to build your interfaces and integrate them in your RubyMotion project. Is such a thing possible? Or do I really have code everything by hand, not to mention maintain to different pieces of code for iPhone/iPad?

My rep isn’t high enough to create a rubymotion tag, so please help out if appropriate.

Answer 1

I’d just like to point out that RubyMotion 1.3 now support automatic compilation of .xib files that you put into the resources folder. So now the workflow becomes :

1. Create your .xib file using XCode (no need to create a project, just use File|New…|File) and save it into the resources folder. As there is no support for outlets yet, be careful to set the tag property for each control you want to use in your code (you’ll find in the property sheet of each component under the “View” header).
2. RubyMotion will take care of compiling your .xib file into a .nib file, so enjoy 🙂
3. In your UIViewController derived class, load the nib using loadNibNamed:owner:options:, as shown below.
4. In viewDidLoad, fetch your various components using viewWithTag: and add events handlers using addTarget:action:forControlEvents:,as show below.

5. As a bonus, next time you want to edit your xib, just do open resources/MyView.xib, it will only launch the good parts of XCode.

   class CalculatorViewController < UIViewController
       def loadView
           views = NSBundle.mainBundle.loadNibNamed "Keyboard", owner:self, options:nil
           self.view = views[0]
       end
   
       def viewDidLoad
           button = view.viewWithTag 1
           button.addTarget self, action:'buttonTapped:', forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside
       end
   
       def buttonTapped(button)
           # ...
       end
   end