RedOchre’s Project Page

I’m working my way through Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass, which would be the perfect book for what I want to learn, except it’s using Objective-C and not RubyCocoa. So I’m getting double the exercise, following along with the Obj-C examples and then translating into RubyCocoa. Today: Chapter 4. The example: a program that will speak a line the user types in.

I won’t go through the Interface Builder set-up, since it’s in the book, but the app will look like this:

If you’ve been playing around with Interface Builder, you should see from my code below what needs to be set up. (oh, and that thing in the bottom left corner is a Color Well)

Make a Cocoa-Ruby Application in XCode. Set up the nib file as it shows in the book, with one exception: don’t “Create Files for AppController” in Interface Builder, do that later by hand in XCode by adding a new “Ruby NSObject subclass” file to the project. Call it AppController.rb.

# the first line of any RubyCocoa file:
require ‘osx/cocoa’

# create the class as a subclass of NSObject
class AppController < OSX::NSObject

# list the outlets that were created in Interface Builder,
# they’ll be used as variables like @textField
ib_outlets :textField, :colorWell

# we’re going to define an init method, but it’s not
# necessary for all applications
def init
# when calling a super’s method, preceed the method name by super_
super_init
# we’ll throw a lot of stuff in the log for now,
# it’ll show up when the program is run
OSX::NSLog(”init”)
# creating a new variable of type NSSpeechSynthesizer
# with the default system voice
@speechSynth = OSX::NSSpeechSynthesizer.alloc.init
# when overriding the init command, make sure to return self:
self
end

# awakeFromNib is run after everything’s initialized, but
# before the user can do anything. I’m not actually sure
# why both methods are necessary…
def awakeFromNib
# setting the color shown in the Color Well to be that of
# the initial contents of textField
@colorWell.setColor(@textField.textColor)
end

# the method to speak the given text
def sayIt(sender)
OSX::NSLog(”sayIt”)
# get string that the user entered
string = @textField.stringValue.to_s
# if it’s empty, don’t do anything
return if string.length == 0
# speak the text
@speechSynth.startSpeakingString(string)
end

# stop speaking the given text
def stopIt(sender)
# here I tried puts intead of NSLog, just to see what the difference was
puts(”stopIt”)
# stop speaking. simple, yes?
@speechSynth.stopSpeaking
end

# change the color of the text in the textField based on
# what the user chooses from the Color Well
def changeTextColor(sender)
@textField.setTextColor(sender.color)
OSX::NSLog(”changing text color”)
end

end

Build. Run. Make your computer say dirty things.