[crazydiamond]

Could someone tell me what I would do using macruby. I am a ruby programmer on a Mac. What kind of apps could i write ?

Are these essentially GUI apps which otherwise i would write using Objective C or Cocoa (i assume its a standalone language) or QT, GTK etc.

So does this allow me to write apps that have the Mac L&F ?

[cubicle67]

> So does this allow me to write apps that have the Mac L&F ?

Yes. MacRuby works well with Interface Builder (the GUI designer for the Mac) and lets you write pretty much anything you could with Obj-C, just quicker :)

There's also the ability to package your MacRuby app as a .app that can be distributed without requiring MacRuby to be installed (MacRuby not required to run the packaged app), but the size of the .app is much larger than an equivalent Obj-C version

[stuntmouse]

You can write native Cocoa apps with MacRuby that have Mac Look and Feel, with better than acceptable performance.

There are clean, high-level Ruby wrappings of UIKit classes, see HotCocoa: http://macruby.com/hotcocoa.html, although it's not clear to me how extensive this part of MacRuby is.

[Zev]

Just to nitpick, its AppKit, not UIKit. UIKit is on the iPhone, where, sadly, MacRuby isn't available.