Book Image

RubyMotion iOS Development Essentials

Book Image

RubyMotion iOS Development Essentials

Overview of this book

RubyMotion is a revolutionary toolchain for iOS app development. With RubyMotion, you can quickly develop and test native iOS apps for the iPhone and iPad, combining the expressiveness and simplicity of Ruby with the power of the iOS SDK. "RubyMotion iOS Development Essentials" is a hands-on guide for developing iOS apps using RubyMotion. With RubyMotion, you can eliminate the complexity and confusion associated with the development of iOS applications using Objective-C. We'll begin from scratch. Starting by installing RubyMotion, we'll build ourselves up to developing an app that uses the various device capabilities iOS has to offer. What's more, we'll even learn how to launch your app on the App Store! We'll also learn to use iOS SDK classes to create application views. Discover how to use the camera, geolocation, gestures, and other device capabilities to create engaging, interactive apps. We'll develop stunning user interfaces faster with the XCode interface builder and make web apps by using WebView. We'll then augment applications with RubyMotion gems, doing more by writing less code and learn how to write test cases for RubyMotion projects. Finally, we'll understand the app submission process to push your app to Apple's App Store With "RubyMotion iOS Development Essentials", we will learn how to create iOS apps with ease. At the end of each chapter we will have a tangible and running app, which utilizes the concepts we have learnt in that chapter.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
RubyMotion iOS Development Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Memory management


Memory management is an important programming principle of handling the life cycles of objects and releasing them when they are no longer needed in your application. Management of object memory is necessary to have good performance; if an application doesn't free unneeded objects, its memory footprint grows and performance suffers.

RubyMotion provides automatic memory management; you do not need to reclaim unused objects. Also, as memory in any iOS device is limited, the bad acting application would just be killed at some point.

Memory management in a Cocoa application that doesn't use garbage collection is based on a reference-counting method. RubyMotion also uses reference-counting ways to reclaim memory. When you create or copy an object, its retain count is 1. Thereafter, other objects may express an ownership interest in your object, which increments its retain count. The owners of an object may also surrender their possession interest in it, which reduces the retain...