... any app that tried to get me to use some generic GUI instead
of using Aqua is an app I wouldn't use. ...
Well, actually, you use non-Aqua GUIs all the time.
But my definition of "application" doesn't include web sites. Yours might. 
You may be interested to know about
RubyCocoa - A Ruby/Objective-C Bridge for Mac OS X with Cocoa
Actually, I've been using RubyCocoa for some months.
My experience with CamelBones (which does the same sort of thing for
Perl) leads me to suspect that the experience is not seamless:
* Objective-C has its own naming conventions and method invocation
syntax, which are quite different from those used by Ruby, Python,
etc. In CamelBones, this means that the programmer has to look up
methods by "translated" names, etc.
The developer came up with two different methods for mapping. I only learned one of them, because it's so easy.
To grab a random sample out of "Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX"
- (void)drawAtPoint:(NSPoint)aPoint
withAttributes:(NSDictionary *)attribs
should appear in Ruby as
def drawAtPoint_withAttributes(aPoint, attribs)
blah blah blah
end
Interface Builder will 'magically' fill in ObjC skeletons for you in XCode, but you have to do that yourself in Ruby. Since that basically means that you don't get
def YourObjectNameHere(something)
end
typed for you, I really don't think that's too much of a loss. I am occasionally tripped up when I don't get a Cocoa object turned back into a Ruby one, but that's because it's _almost_ always handled by RubyCocoa.
RubyCocoa's still chasing some of the more recent and esoteric features. "Bindings" are not entirely smooth, and "Core Data" (from Tiger) depends on Bindings. But my background has been using XCode with AppleScript, and Ruby and RubyCocoa are doing much better than the AppleScript Studio support from Apple.
RubyCocoa does teach XCode do to syntactic coloring and procedural bookmarking and other stuff. Overall, I like it.
I would be happy to hear comments from any RubyCocoa users, as I've been
considering trying it out at some point...
Try rubycocoa-talk@lists.sourceforge.net. They're very nice and helpful, even when I've been rather grumpy and cross from being tortured by the installers for Ruby, RubyCocoa, Rails, RubyAEOSA, and RubyGems. I don't think I"ve ever had a Ruby[whatever] install itself smoothly the first time, with the single exception of whoever created the Ruby 1.8.2 installer that uses the Mac's own installation system. That, thank the stars, actually worked right the first time.
···
On Oct 5, 2005, at 10:47, Rich Morin wrote:
At 6:58 PM +0900 10/5/05, Dave Howell wrote:
to make clear
to make