I don’t even own an iPad, but I’m already blogging about the DODOCase  and have bookmarked the website, so kudos to these guys for excellent marketing!

Photo by adamjackson on Flickr (license)

If you’ve reached this post by searching for something similar, I’m guessing you want to do one of two things: either 1) run Ruby on an iPad, or 2) develop for the iPad using Ruby.

1) Run Ruby on the iPad

Never going to happen.

Like the iPod and the iPhone, the iPad is a closed system. The only near-possible way to run Ruby on an iPad would, I’m guessing, be to create an app which bundled Ruby and provided a command-line interface to it. But that’s not going to happen either. Can you imagine Apple approving an app which allowed users to run any code they liked — even within a sandbox? Neither can I.

2) Develop for the iPad using Ruby

This is less clear-cut: there’s obviously no support for Ruby in the Objective-C iPad SDK, but we do have MacRuby: “a version of Ruby 1.9, ported to run directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies”. I think the key words there are “Mac OS X technologies (my emphasis)”; Mac OS X is different to iPhone/iPad OS X, and right now there’s about as much chance of using MacRuby to develop iPad apps as there is of Bill Gates coming to work at Apple.

That might change though (the MacRuby thing, not Bill Gates) — which change would depend on MacRuby becoming a popular way to develop for the Mac. If enough developers use it, Apple may — may — decide it’s worth their time an effort to port MacRuby to their other platforms.

So, Googler: there’s some small hope.

Some random, contradictory thoughts triggered by Apple’s iPad event.

It’s an evolution, not a revolution. I know this is a massive oversimplification, but it’s basically a bigger iPhone. The iPhone wasn’t a bigger anything — it was the first of its kind.

That’s not to say that the iPad is anything less than the iPhone (for some people it’s going to be better: more screen space, more functionality) but it’s not a game changer.

What is it for? I’m not convinced that I need to get one of these in the same way that I was convinced I should buy an iPhone when they came out. When I saw an iPhone, I thought “holy crap, that blows my Nokia out of the water”. When I see the iPad, I think “that’s cool, but I could just buy a Macbook Air”.

I can absolutely, 100% imagine sitting in an armchair with an iPad after work and checking up on my favourite websites.

It’s a compliment to a Mac, not a replacement for one.

If the eBook features are good, Amazon will be more than a bit worried. Amazon must be more than a bit worried.

The “half-screen iPhone apps” thing is crazy — doesn’t look right. They should have run them with the desktop in the background, like widgets.

Great move releasing the SDK on day one. I wonder if Apple made a special effort to do that because of what happened with the iPhone (complaints about no SDK, jailbreaking), or just because the SDK is their now anyway (from the iPhone)?

The little home button at the bottom looks silly.

The dock looks even sillier.

If I owned one, I’d buy more books. This is why publishers should get involved.

The iBook font changer is nice, but — Times New Roman?!

It’s cool that they’re using ePub (an open format)

Even though I don’t need to, I want to use iWork on an iPad because it’s just cool that you can.

I would have preferred to be able to run more than one app at once.

Using different keyboard layouts for different tasks is a nice touch.

$30 for unlimited internet is a bargain — if you use it.

$499 is a brilliant price.

Apple was never going to live up to the hype on this.

The iPad is all about convenience.

All in all the iPad looks pretty cool — on a level with the Macbook Air, not the iPhone; a refinement of something that Apple are already offering, rather than a completely new invention.