ProMotion

iPhone Apps, Ruby-style

ProMotion is a RubyMotion gem that makes iOS development more like Ruby and less like Objective-C. It introduces a clean, Ruby-style syntax for building screens that is easy to learn and remember and abstracts a ton of boilerplate UIViewController, UINavigationController, and other iOS code into a simple, Ruby-like DSL.

• Watch Jamon Holmgren give a talk about ProMotion at RubyMotion #inspect2014 (video)
• Watch the September 2013 Motion Meetup where Gant Laborde interviews Jamon Holmgren about ProMotion

# app/app_delegate.rb
class AppDelegate < PM::Delegate
  status_bar true, animation: :fade

  def on_load(app, options)
    open RootScreen.new(nav_bar: true)
  end
end

# app/screens/root_screen.rb
class RootScreen < PM::Screen
  title "Root Screen"

  def on_load
    set_nav_bar_button :right, title: "Help", action: :open_help_screen
  end

  def open_help_screen
    open HelpScreen
  end
end

# app/screens/help_screen.rb
class HelpScreen < PM::TableScreen
  title "Table Screen"

  def table_data
    [{
      title: "Help",
      cells: [
        { title: "About this app", action: :tapped_about },
        { title: "Log out", action: :log_out }
      ]
    }]
  end

  def tapped_about(args={})
    open AboutScreen
  end

  def log_out
    # Log out!
  end
end

Features

Screens	Navigation Bars	Tab Bars

Table Screens	Grouped Tables	Searchable	Refreshable

iPad SplitScreens	Map Screens	Web Screens

...and much more.

Getting Started

1. Check out the Getting Started Guide in the wiki
2. Watch the excellent MotionInMotion screencast about ProMotion (very reasonably priced subscription required)
3. Follow a tutorial: Building an ESPN app using RubyMotion, ProMotion, and TDD
4. Read the updated and exhaustive Wiki

Changelog

Version 2.0.0

Overview: In ProMotion 2.0, we removed deprecated APIs, refactored and cleaned up a ton of code, pulled PushNotification and MapScreen into their own gems, and simplified the API. It now builds 55% faster and is 20%+ lighter.

Follow our Migration Guide for a painless upgrade.

API changes

1. Extracted PM::MapScreen into ProMotion-map
2. Extracted PM::PushNotification into ProMotion-push
3. You can't pass a UIImage or UIView into a title anymore. Instead, pass a string into title_image (it'll fetch the image for you and create a UIImageView) or pass any arbitrary view into title_view. Now, title only takes a string title.
4. on_create has been renamed screen_init to avoid confusion with Android's onCreate method. It may be reintroduced in a future version of ProMotion as an alias of onCreate. We recommend using on_init instead.
5. set_nav_bar_right_button and set_nav_bar_left_button have been removed. Use set_nav_bar_button :right and :left instead.
6. Added NSString#to_url and NSURL#to_url helper methods to help clean up a lot of code.
7. present_modal_view_controller now takes two arguments: the ViewController and an argument hash. You shouldn't have been using it in the first place.
8. open_in_tab now properly opens screens in tabs that didn't have a nav_bar. This is probably the closest thing to a new feature in PM 2.0 that we have, even though it should have worked before.
9. Cell hash arbitrary values are no longer applied directly to the cell. Instead, use the style: hash to apply arbitrary attributes. Example here.
10. Removed cell hash :subviews attribute. Instead, subclass PM::TableViewCell and add your own subviews there.
11. Actually, there is one new feature. It's called longpressable. By adding longpressable at the top of your PM::TableScreen and then supplying a long_press_action: in your cell hash, you can implement a different action for long presses on table cells.
12. We no longer insert the cell hash into the arguments hash passed into your cell tap action. If you need that data, pass it in manually.
13. Removed add_element, add_view, remove_element, remove_view aliases for add and remove.
14. on_load now fires on viewDidLoad instead of loadView. Added a new load_view hook for that method & you can set your own view in there. If you don't implement load_view, one will be created for you (per Apple's recommendations). This change shouldn't change much in your app except that if you're setting self.view = something, you should do it in load_view.

Internal changes:

1. Removed motion-require. ProMotion now relies entirely on RubyMotion's built-in dependency detector.
2. Removed rake spec:unit, rake spec:func, rake spec:single filename. We don't really use these for development anymore.
3. Moved many files around into a more logical, simpler structure.
4. Removed PM::Conversions. The only helper we were using was the objective_c_method_name method, and that was only used in PM::Styling. So we moved it there.
5. New module, PM::NavBarModule. Moved any navigation controller methods into this module, cleaning up the PM::ScreenModule quite a bit.
6. Lots of code refactoring -- CodeClimate went from 2.47 to 3.35 GPA.
7. Much cleaner open code!
8. Converted several slow functional tests into fast unit tests with the same coverage.

API Reference

We've created a comprehensive and always updated wiki with code examples, usage examples, and API reference.

ProMotion API Reference

Help

ProMotion is not only an easy DSL to get started. The community is very helpful and welcoming to new RubyMotion developers. We don't mind newbie questions.

If you need help, feel free to open an issue on GitHub. If we don't respond within a day, tweet us a link to the issue -- sometimes we get busy.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Primary Contributors

• Jamon Holmgren: @jamonholmgren
• Silas Matson: @silasjmatson
• Mark Rickert: @markrickert
• Ryan Linton: @ryanlntn
• Many others