Ruby

Just finished reading chapters 1-9, 14, and 16 of The Book of Ruby. Very powerful language, really looking forward to integrating YAML into applications. Did some research and found that this wiki shows how you can use NetBeans to make a javax.swing GUI for a desktop application and operate it with Ruby code. I really like the NetBeans GUI builder so I'm enthusiastic about creating future desktop apps using Ruby and a Swing GUI. The other Ruby GUI options I considered were foxGUIb and wxRuby. I ran into some technical problems so I basically gave up on the last two.

On another note, I have also been researching making mac and iphone apps using Ruby. It seems that in the history of iPhone apps, most of the ones coded in Ruby have been rejected by Apple, however once compiled all programs look the same so I don't think that this correlation means Apple is biased.

A new application called MacRuby basically converts Ruby into Objective-C so that you can use Ruby with the standard Mac "stuff" (cocoa, iPhone SDK) and develop a Mac app. This also means that you can use this program to create an iPhone app. This is a nice surprise however you still have to know lots of Objective-C to use this application, and even more about Objective-C classes. More information is here. Another alternative is rubyCocoa, which does basically the same thing but is not in Beta. Again, you need to know about Objective-C classes to use this.

So in conclusion, it's going to be a while before I can write an application for any Mac based platform.