From idea to AppStore in 2 weeks

A year or two back three of us (one only very part-time, and two of us inexperienced) developed an iOS app that did two way translation (speech - text - text - speech) using two three different services from two different vendors, from scratch in less than a week. In Objective-C. (It didn't get submitted to the App Store, it was demoed to potential investors and then disappeared, presumably owing to the existence of similar apps.)<p>Not a terribly ambitious app, but no less ambitious than the app described.<p>Ruby Motion looks interesting, but I don't really see how it would make a big difference to shipping something like this in a very short time frame.

Hi, great looking app, well done! I'm wondering if you ended up caching the Tube status information on your own web server, or if you are directly accessing Transport for London's site?

Incidentally my first iOS app is also a London tube statuses app. But i never made any money out of it, (i deemed it unworthy of 1$).<p>Although i was learning Obj C for some time, i developed my tube map app in 2 weeks of starting with cocoa framework.<p>Its time to start looking at marketing 101 lessons :).

I'm curious if the author was able to earn the initial investment in the tools: <i>200$</i> <i></i>RubyMotion<i></i> + <i>100$</i> <i></i>iOS Developer<i></i>.

If you know and enjoy coding in Ruby, you intend to target only iOS, and you don't know Objective-C, C or C++ than RubyMotion is a good investment.<p>On the other hand, if you want to target iOS and Android you'd better learn Objective-C and Java. An interesting alternative is to use HTML5 and JavaScript if you already have a good background as a web developer.

This is great. I spent much, much longer on my first iOS app and it isn't half as successful. Very well thought up and executed.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like because iOS is such a hot platform right now everyone is trying to hop on the bandwagon without learning anything new. Write iOS apps in ObjC. It's not hard, it's not that different, it's just something you don't know yet.

Might just be the fonts, but this looks like a Windows 8 app.<p>Congrats on the launch!

&#62; earning me enough pennies to buy some Dominos pizza.<p>To a large extent this has been the real problem in the iOS app domain for a while. Apps are far more likely to make you enough to buy a small pizza than even approach earning you a reasonable salary.<p>Part of it, I think, are the mechanics of the App Store itself. Search has been broken for years. When compared to searching on the 'net the difference is stark. This is unfortunate because developers who do a little financial math will, without a doubt, walk away. You are far more likely to make money with a good website than on the App Store. That's why people hesitate to spend $200 on Ruby Motion...you simply won't get your money back unless you use it to write apps for others and earn money for your work rather than from your apps.

Great post - I love reading about this rapid fast releases, even better when the writer had to learn a new language.<p>I was curious about ruby motion beforehand but now I can't wait to get stuck in.<p>Oh, and congrats! :D

Congrats. I still can't get by the initial cost of RubyMotion. I know, it will pay for itself, but that's a lot of initial buy-in going on faith. I wish they had a demo version available to try before buying.

I'm really curious about that.<p>There are about half dozen similar applications on the Appstore, for free.<p>I tried a few, and most of them did the job they were suppose to do fairly well.<p>How did you convince people to choose yours as opposed to the other ones that already existed ?<p>Clearly the Metro article is what pushed people (that possibly didn't know that those apps existed) to actually get and download your app.<p>Congrats and kudos.

I'm also pushing out a rubymotion app in the next week. Its hard to estimate how much time it saved me but it definitely made building the app a much more enjoyable experience.

This looks like a sales pitch for Ruby Motion to me.

"BUT, and it's a big butt" - deliberate misspelling?

4 days for approval? That's pretty fast.