As used previously, the motion command creates our RubyMotion project and also supports various other options. The motion command is similar to the popular framework Ruby on Rails' rails command. Before we go any further, let's fire up our terminal and see what can be done using the motion command.

$ motion
Usage:
 motion [-h, --help]
 motion [-v, --version]
 motion <command> [<args...>]
Commands:
 account Access the software license account
 activate Activate the software license
 create Create a new project 
 ri Display API reference 
 update Update the software
 support Create a support ticket

Rake is a simple Ruby build program with capabilities similar to Make. RubyMotion's rake command has many predefined tasks that help you do several trivial jobs, such as compiling your code to test in a simulator or creating a package to test on a device, with ease. Let's fire up our terminal again and check what tasks can be performed using rake --tasks.

$ rake ––tasks

The following table elaborates the different Rake tasks:

So Rake has plenty of tasks to do, but most importantly, out of all these tasks, if we simply run Rake, it will build and run our application on the iOS simulator.

RubyMotion applications are highly configurable using different attributes in a Rakefile. These attributes, by default, come with a sensible value but can be overridden with custom values. Let's explore each one of them—this section will come in handy, time and again, as we proceed with our application.

To see your current application configuration, run the rake config task, and you will be presented with the following list:

$ rake config
background_modes : []
build_dir : "./build"
codesign_certificate : "Error"
delegate_class : "AppDelegate"
deployment_target : "6.0"
device_family : :iphone
entitlements : {}
files : ["./app/app_delegate.rb", "./app/twitter.rb", "./app/twitter_controller.rb"]
fonts : []
frameworks : ["UIKit", "Foundation", "CoreGraphics", "CoreGraphics"]
icons : []
identifier : "com.yourcompany.MacBaconUI"
interface_orientations : [:portrait, :landscape_left, :landscape_right]
libs : []
motiondir : "/Library/RubyMotion"
name : "MacBacon UI"
prerendered_icon : false
provisioning_profile : "Error"
resources_dir : "./resources"
sdk_version : "6.0"
seed_id : "Error"
short_version : "1"
specs_dir : "./spec"
status_bar_style : :default
version : "1.0"
weak_frameworks : []
xcode_dir : "/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer"

You can see the entire configuration settings for your application. These settings can be modified in a Rakefile. You may find it easy to understand what these properties do by their names, but let us explain a few of them: