In reply to remus:
Hey Remus!
> How much did you end up writing in Ruby before you (presumably) ported it over to a new language? Was it hard work making the transition?
It was, give or take, the topo view without any paging mechanism, and a partial crag list from what I remember. I'd worked on it for about three or four months by that point, and I was running into issues with RubyMotion that I was struggling to diagnose. The extra layer of technology was just adding to the complexity, and I'd come to the realisation that I needed to know the frameworks and Objective C just as well as if I was using them directly, as all the docs were in Objective C, so I may as well use the system Apple wanted me to.
Luckily, the ruby version acted like a prototype, and it's pretty quick to port something to another language once you've figured out all the mechanics.
> With the chopping for the tiles I was surprised to hear you did that by hand. Is this something you've automated now? Or is there some hidden complexity that makes it tricky?
I should probably revisit that part of the article to make it clearer. Initially, I used a tiling application I downloaded from somewhere. I just did a single topo - Stoney Electric Quarry - by hand, and I used that for all my prototyping. Now all this is automated with a custom mac app.
The problem at the start was bootstrapping the system. I didn't know for sure that I was going down the right path with any of the architecture, but I needed eg these tiled images to make the topo view, and data to feed in to draw the overlay, so I bodged it together a bit by hand and a bit by making throwaway scripts.