Because of the way RubyMotion compiles your application, you may run into dependency issues between your ruby files. By default, RubyMotion uses a simple Dir.glob command to load your files:

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Dir.glob(File.join(app.project_dir, 'app/**/*.rb'))

Suppose you create a custom module under app/lib/foo.rb with some convenience methods:

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module Foo
  def self.bar
    "bar"
  end
end

And then you include it in your AppDelegate class:

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class AppDelegate
  include Foo

  def application(application, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:launchOptions)
    @bar = self.bar
    true
  end
end

When you run rake, you may run into this:

(main)>> 2012-05-06 16:58:49.269 app[88253:f803] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NameError', reason: 'uninitialized constant AppDelegate::Foo (NameError)
'
*** First throw call stack:
(0x156a022 0x1b0cd6 0xd1c34 0x2377 0x2225)
terminate called throwing an exception

The basic solution, which RubyMotion’s documentation suggests, is to use the app.files_dependencies option in your Rakefile:

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Motion::Project::App.setup do |app|
  # Use `rake config' to see complete project settings.
  app.name = 'app'
  app.files_dependencies 'app/app_delegate.rb' => 'app/lib/foo.rb'
end

However, if you are building a large app, and want Foo to be available to all your classes, you probably don’t want to have dozens of 'app/baz.rb' => 'app/lib/foo.rb' entries. In my project, I’m just altering the array of files from Dir.glob instead, ensuring my modules get loaded first:

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app.files = Dir.glob(File.join(app.project_dir, 'app/lib/**/*.rb')) |
            Dir.glob(File.join(app.project_dir, 'app/**/*.rb'))