I had a really good time at RubyConf 2007, and I'd have to say that it was the most enjoyable conference that I've been to. The highlights of the conference for me were seeing other Ruby implementations, seeing the new Ruby features in Mac OS X Leopard, and meeting up with an Emacs group.

The talks on IronRuby, JRuby, and Rubinius were pretty interesting. It's nice to know that if you are stuck in a .Net or Java shop, there is a little hope that Ruby may work its way into your projects.

Phil Hagelberg gave an interesting talk about getting more feedback from the tools you use while you're writing code, especially from your editor. It was nice to see that he was using Emacs in his examples. After his talk, I chatted with him about Emacs, and we setup a time for an Emacs group meetup. I told Matz about the meetup, and he was kind enough to stop by for a few minutes after his keynote. He told us an interesting anecdote about how he added the keyword 'end' to Ruby so that Emacs could properly auto indent the code. This goes for any editor/tool, but Matz specifically uses Emacs. Also, he said that he uses elisp to help him develop Ruby.

Ryan Davis' talk "Hurting Code for Fun and Profit" was entertaining. It an interesting concept. Basically, if you love the code, nurture it and enjoy it. Otherwise, hate the code and hurt it, rip it out and rewrite it or fix it, be ruthless and mean, laugh at it, bend it to your will. So, I guess if loving the code doesn't work, become a code sadist. Actually, in this case, a Ruby Sadist.

Laurent Sansonetti's talk "Mac OS X Loves Ruby" was awesome. I liked the RubyCocoa demo. He showed how to use XCode to bind Ruby code to a form textbox and a form button by just dragging the file to each one and selecting the appropriate inputs and outputs. He, also, showed a demo of using Ruby to manipulate an already running application, such as TextEdit. His other demos were good, too. The audience couldn't help but break out into applause as they watched him manipulate Leopard by using Ruby, and he did this mostly at the command line.

I've been using Mac OS X Leopard for about a day now. The unfortunate thing that I discovered was that Leopard's X11 support is not quite working yet. There are issues with Inkscape and Gimp, and I couldn't get Emacs to work in X11. This encouraged me to find a better way to get Emacs into a windowed environment, and I ended up being able to create (uh, copy) an Emacs.app.

To create an Emacs.app, do the following:

Download the Emacs source code. Note: Leopard comes with emacs 22.1.1 (uses Carbon), so you want to download emacs-22.1.tar.gz. However, instead of downloading the entire source code, you can download just the Emacs.app from me here to save GNU 36MB of bandwidth.

Extract the files.

$ tar zxvf emacs-22.1.tar.gz

Go to the 'emacs-22.1/mac' directory

$ cd emacs-22.1/mac

Copy 'Emacs.app' to '/Applications/'

$ sudo cp -r Emacs.app /Applications/

Symlink /usr/bin/emacs to /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/emacs

$ ln -s /usr/bin/emacs /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/emacs

And, you may want to change the ownership on the Emacs.app

$ sudo chown -R root:admin /Applications/Emacs.app

That's it. You should now be able to launch Emacs.app as a regular Mac application.