Running with shoes

I've been playing off and on with Shoes for the last couple of weeks. Shoes is a simple ruby GUI toolkit designed for beginners. It seems like a really cool way to do the GUI aspects of simple desktop applications, designed to reduce the barriers to entry.

Instead of the intimidating scope of something like learning the GTK API, with Shoes you only need to learn a few core abstractions, and you're off and running with simple and beautiful code.

Want to add a button? Its as simple as

button "My Button"

To add a handler on that button?

b = button "My Button"
b.click do
  alert "You clicked my button!"
end

I'm pretty excited about playing with this. Unfortunately, however, the framework is very young and still pretty buggy. Documentation is reasonably good, but definitely incomplete. I'm trying to get a development environment together so I can debug some of the problems in the framework that I've run into, but so far have been unsuccessful at building a working version of Shoes; I get a mostly functioning version, but the text is showing up as boxes. I think I'm getting something wrong in the dependencies... I dunno. I've got a question in to the mailing list about this, so we'll see what happens.

In the meantime, I've built a little tool to make my turnaround time for testing how shoes code will look a bit faster. Shoes Preview lets you enter code & see what it will look like all without restarting Shoes. Its still pretty clunky, but already speeding me up from the modify/save/reopen cycle that I had been using. If you try it out, feel free to send me patches or suggestions! Happy hacking!