Tag Archives: iOS

Embed Ruby in Your iOS Apps Using mruby

I've been playing with mruby for the past week or so. If you haven't seen it yet it is an embeddable version of Ruby. The first thing I wonder about when I heard about mruby last year a RubyConf was embedding it in iOS apps. Now that the initial version has been released I figured I would give it a try.

There are a few things to take into account before diving into this. The first is that the mruby project is very new and there are a number of gaps in the language support right now but the goal is to support the ISO definition of Ruby at some point. The second thing to know is that I'm talking about embedding Ruby here and not writing iOS apps using Ruby. I'm more interested in the potential of Ruby as a scripting language for something like a game. If you want to look into writing iOS apps using Ruby check out RubyMotion or the MobiRuby project (MobiRuby is based on mruby).

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Using WebP to Reduce Native iOS App Size

Last year Google released WebM as an alternative to h264 encoded video. They followed that up with the release of WebP as an alternative to JPG. Ever since the release I've been thinking about giving it a try on iOS to see how well it might work to reduce application size. As a bonus to reduced size, WebP also supports an alpha channel that JPG doesn't (there is more information available on the original release blog post).

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