Building Your First App

Welcome to Android app development with Ruby Motion! Before we get going, we need to make sure you're up and running with RubyMotion. Please head over to the RubyMotion website and run through their Getting Started manual (if you haven't already done so).

If you get hung-up there, you might want to check out this list of gotchas.

If you don't have an Android device, and aren't using Genymotion, you might want to jump over to the lesson about Genymotion and start using it before you move on in these lessons.

If you have already done all of that, and you've got everything up and running already then that's great, let's keep going :)

A Note on Sweat

I want to see you sweat.

I want to see you work a little at learning these things for yourself, but I don't want to see you give up because you're overwhelmed.

In this first lesson we're not going to use any of the awesome tools available for making life easier in Android! The reason for this is that the Android API is just SO BIG. No one is going to translate the whole thing into RubyMotion-speak for you. That means when the going gets tough, the tough head over to the docs, the Android docs.

Don't worry, after we've walked through a basic app like this, the very first thing we'll do is get familiar with the 3rd party tools that make Android development more Ruby-like and human-friendly. And from then on I'll focus these tutorials on using the best and brightest gems available.

Now, throughout these tutorials, I'll try to explain some things and leave others up to you. If you find I've missed the balance and some parts are too frustrating or unhelpful, please let me know! My ultimate goal for this website is to make learning app development as fun and easy as learning Ruby was.