new blog

I have started a new blog and will merge this one with the new one. No further blogposts will be made here.

Checkout my new blog!

Ten Steps in Shoes: step 3, Buttons

An image says more than a thousand words. Trying trying to find the right image to convey the words takes a thousand clicks. While Google takes the lead in many different technologies nowadays, they have not yet found a smart way to index pictures. Usually, finding the right picture for a new blogpost takes ages.

Good news though, a while back I bought my first DSRL camera and am fully experimenting with it at the moment. So, in the future I can just make my pics in stead of searching the internets.

But, while an image can say more than a thousand words, does it speak the same language as the observer? Well, like many things it's all a matter of perspective.
The above image can be viewed from a few perspectives providing an impression of the situation of my blog. One one hand we see Shoes taking steps. Like the series I was supposed to blog. On the other hand we see a person standing still. That's me standing still, being preoccupied with stuff, not blogging or doing much else. He's stepped upon by a giant. That giant might well represent Google crushing me with too much information in one step, deleting my
draft-blogposts with the other. Taking another point of view it could be me taking steps again. Maybe it was me taking steps on myself...

...right, anyway, it's time to check out the Shoes button!

Here's how you add a button to a Shoes app:

Shoes.app do
b = button("button")
end

Now we want the button to do something. You can pass a block to a button like so:
Shoes.app do
b = button("button"){ alert "you pushed the button" }
end

A block is code between { and }, it can be another method, or multiple lines of code, whatever you want. You can read more about blogs at the blogpost on struggling with ruby.

In our block we used an alert, a type of control. Don't worry about those, we will talk more about those in the next step.

So that's it, yeah!

p.s. announcing to do series of blogposts is a really bad idea. Either deal with stuff in one post or don't blog about it. Hard lessons of the blogosphere are learned the hard way!

Human 2.0 or Paranoid Android?

Since my childhood I have been warned about them. Someday will come when they will realize their superiority over us simple humans, take over the world and take their place as technological overlords.

You know what I'm talking about: terminators, genius evil androids, transformers, technically enhanced humans, depressed androids and robots with identity issues. All superior due to their technical prowess.


Indeed, technology is a very powerful and yes, entertaining thing. Some people don't want anything to do with it. Technology is too energy consuming, to complex, missing of any emotion or warmth. Few others warn of security and privacy implications.

Most of them think in terms of that which exists, that which has always been. A fixed reference to our roots, the physical world and old civilizations.

However, all those people forget to take into account some other basic and primitive elements in humanity. The hunt for new riches, the thirst for information and most of all the need to evolve. Some people still question evolution, others think we evolved from primates and that was it. However, for millenia, our environment has challenged us to adapt and we did so using technology.
We have evolved by making and using new tools to manipulate our environment. We have come at a point in time where we don't need to evolve to survive in our environment. Instead we ourselves have become the masters of our environment.

In all those years evolving, we have really not evolved ourselves. Look at how we treat the environment we have mastered and how we treat each other. It seems, humanity has still a long way to go, but who do we need to conquer?

Today, judgment day has arrived. In an effort to compensate for the imperfect, that is us human beings, a leap has been made. A leap into an uncertain future, to transform, to adapt or to succumb. In no other time in human history has technology progressed to such levels as now. It's all around us and there is no escape.
We can make a simple choice: evolve into human 2.0 or become the Paranoid Android. The future does not seem to hold any other alternative.

Being quite on the paranoid side myself I was not enjoying this prospect. The big corporations would rule us all. All aspects of my life would be monitored by some overlord with a big mustache, or beard for that matter. However, some while ago an interesting thought occurred to me when reading the daily early morning data-breach news headers. Security, privacy, image and revenue are the pillars of technology. Take one and the technology will ultimately fall.

With these thoughts in my mind I reasoned or adapted my worries away as I purchased the T-mobile G1, the Google phone with Android. And what about the terminators and transformers? Well, time will tell but the future looks bright!

Ten Steps in Shoes: step 2, Stack & Flow

Woow, I've been getting quite a lot of feedback on my last post. Thanks for the messages, I really appreciate it! It gets me even more enthusiastic about blogging and Shoes, I hope in my turn I get some other people to be Shoes enthusiasts. If I do, or you are already, consider blogging about it. For me it helps a lot in keeping focussed and to explore a bit further. I always love to read small articles and blogs on Ruby and Shoes, so if you happen to have one let me know!

If you read my previous post, you might have noticed a lack of layout structure in one of the examples. Some of the text was right behind the other, or even overlapped, and it all just looked like a big unsorted pile. This might be fine for dirty clothes or dishes, but our app aint dirty! But no worries, you can create order in this chaos by making neat columns and rows, by using stacks and flows!

To help a bit in explaining, I'll introduce you to something else first. Meet background, background is quite a cool, colourful fellow. You can use background within stacks and flows. One famous flow is the Shoesapp itself. So try this:

Shoes.app do
  background black
  para "Look ma, a black background!", :size => 30, :align => "center", :stroke => crimson
end

Let's drift a bit farther from our main objective and try a gradient with an angle:

  background "#FF0".."#0FF", :angle => 60

Or an image!

  background "justsomelocal.jpg", :border => "FF0".."0FF", :strokewidth => 10

You can even use an online picture and a border like so

  background "http://poignantguide.net/ruby/i/the.foxes-4c.png"

Sometimes, using online images seem to cause some problems. Don't know why exactly, let's move on for now.

The Stack
A stack is something that allows you to put one thing above the other, simple as that. Stacks can make your shoes look sexy!

Let's create a stack containing four para's:

Shoes.app do
  stack do
    para "heya"
    para "we are stacked"
    para "stacked you see?"
    para "different lines"
  end
end

Let's create put all the para's in their own stacks. One is blue, so he needs a friend:

Shoes.app do
  stack do
    background fuchsia
    para "hi again"
  end
  
  stack do
    background cornflowerblue
    para "we are in stacks"
    para "we are blue together"
  end

  stack do
    background peru
    para "each our own"
  end

  stack do
    background gold
    para "with our colours"
  end
end

Remember some of the style options in the previous post? Well, you can use many of them exactly in the same way.

Shoes.app do
  background black
  stack :width => 100  do
    background fuchsia
    para "we are not wide"
  end

  stack :width => 200, :height => 150, :scroll => true  do
    background cornflowerblue
    para "we are in stacks"
    para "the stack is high"
    para "content exeeds height"
    para "bla"
    para "blabla"
    para "but we have a scrollbar"
  end
  
  stack :top => 250, :left => 150 do
    background gold
    para "some margin for errors"
  end
end

The Flow
A flow is like a stack, but horizontal. But, unlike a stack, a flow has a limit. Why? Because there are no horizontal scrollbars, those suck anyway! So try to imagine your flow like a typewriter, going back and down when you have reached the end.

Now wait a minute, just think about it. Remember those para's from step 1? Remember how the para text was placed behind the others until it wrapped around? It's a flow! The shoes.app is a flow! So you already know the basic flow behaviour a bit. So lets just skip the talk and try a combination of stack and flow!

Shoes.app :width => 400, :height => 140 do
  flow do
    stack :width => '50%' do
      background khaki
      para "first stack"
      para "stacks rock"
      para "khakis are only cool in shoes"
    end
  
    stack :width => '40%' do
      background peru
      para "second stack"
    end
    
    para "i'm no stack but just in a flow, but did not fit", :stroke => blue
  end
end

See, Shoes.app is a flow, so we can use the same style options for it, like setting the height! This example should demonstrate how stacks and flows differ from each other, but can work together. If only the people of the world were like stacks and flows!

10 Steps in Shoes, step 1: Para's

Phew, this has been one of those weeks in which you need to put everyone and everything on hold. But now is not a time to stand still, instead we are going to start the Shoes travel by taking the first step in Shoes. It's going to be a short walk though, just 10 steps to be exact. There are 10 basic concepts in Shoes and we will take a look at the basic possibilities of each one as we talk the talk and learn to walk the walk. We will keep it short, so you have no excuses not to walk with us, let's go!

Wear your Shoes
To start taking steps, you first need to have Shoes. So make sure you have Ruby and Shoes installed.

Tie your Shoes
Before we can start using anything in Shoes, we need to create a Shoes app.
Open a file in your favorite editor, mine being vi and call it step1.rb. Notice the .rb extension, that's for Ruby, not Shoes. But how does Ruby know we want to run a Shoes app? Well just write "Shoes.app do" in the first line of your Shoes code. See, Shoes is easy! How to end a Shoes app? Any guesses? Yes you are right, write "end"!

Here's what your Shoes app looks like:

Shoes.app do

end

Para's
Now that you know how to start coding a Shoes app, let's take the first step in Shoes! Any programming starts with a first program to salute the world, so you need to know how to write some text, or a paragraph if you have much to say. Lets write a short paragraph, in fact lets not say paragraph but say para instead.

Shoes.app do
para "Hello World!"
end

Save your file and open it with Shoes by running "shoes step1.rb" or just opening an app from the Shoes GUI. You will get something like this:

Your shoes application screen just gets filled with the characters you provided to para. Para works quite like writing on a piece of paper, you can write in diferent sizes, in different styles, on different locations and in different colors and when you have reached the end, you start again at the following line. Let's try it. Reopen your file in your editor and add the following line:

para "Hello World, are you there?", :size => 48

Save, run and take a look.
What we did here is use the size style option. Note the comma and the semicolon. Style options are key-value pairs of a hash, hence we use => to say that key size has value 48. This is just like the way we use hashes in Ruby. First I thought the biggest size of text in shoes is 48 and it could not grow beyond 48. This is not true however. You can have really huge letter sizes, I'm not sure if there is a maximum. There is some weird behaviour if you use really, really large values though.

Instead of using a para with a certain size value, you can use any of the following:

title (same as para with size of 34)
subtitle (same as para with size of 26)
tagline (same as para with size of 18)
caption (same as para with size of 14)
para (default size is 12)
inscription (same as para with size of 10)

Colour your shoes!
Even though the eighties have long gone and nobody knows what happend to King, we still want to colour our shoes! Don't click that link if you keep some youth sentiment about that moment you saw your first ever music clip on tv, you have been warned! Better humn that song and use the Shoes equivalent to spraycans to be cool like so:

Shoes.app do
para "Hello World!", :size => 48, :stroke => dodgerblue
subtitle "Why are you not answering?", :stroke => red
tagline "Hmm wait, what to say in case it does answer?", :fill => "#FF0000"
inscription "...yes quite some responsibility to be the one who talks to the world", :fill => darkkhaki
end

What do you think this app will look like? Save and run it! As you might have noticed you can use style options for colors too. Colors can be specified by their name or their hexadecimal Red-Green-Blue value. Here's a list for color names and values. We also used some alternatives to para's.

The Fonts is cool
Heeeyy, use cool Fonts and the girls will be kissing with a snap of the fingers! But that was in a time of innocence and the coolest technology around was a motorcycle. For people who have grown up and want more then just kissing, there is Shoes. The happy days are over, but Shoes has many Fonts.

Shoes.app do
para "heeeeyyyy":font => "Helvetica, Arial"
end

These Shoes are made for walking
I guess you get it by now. There is much more you can do with para and it's siblings. Almost everything is related to style.
You should be able to work it out for yourself, just look at the shoes help on styles. Not all styles work for everything, so note what it says after "For".
Here's a small example of various possibilities.

Shoes.app do
para "Centered text!", :size => 14, :align => "center", :stroke => firebrick
subtitle "justify", :justify => true, :stroke => hotpink, :fill => black
para "top and left", :top => 150, :left => 222, :stroke => mediumspringgreen
tagline "oblique", :emphasis => "oblique", :stroke => peru
inscription "displace", :displace_left => 20, :top => 180
para "more left less top", :top => 250, :left => 280, :stroke => olive
title "strikethrough and strikecolor", :strikethrough => "single", :strikecolor => crimson
caption "leading", :leading => 10
para "undercolor", :underline => "single", :undercolor => darkorchid, :top => 210
tagline "Variant Weight", :variant => "smallcaps", :weight => "heavy", :stroke => gold
end

A few last tips: use alt + ? for help and alt + . to reload your Shoes app in the Shoes GUI. Use alt + / for the Shoes console to see debug messages. Use alt + p to package your app.
I suggest you play with the various options for a bit, and get ready for Step 2!

GUI toolkit extravaganza wrap-up

Folks, I have decided to conclude the GUI toolkit extravaganza. There were two more toolkits to follow, monkeybars and qtruby. But alas, I am not going to check those out any time soon. I just don't feel very curious about these toolkits anymore and want to do some more exploring of Shoes. But I'll take those two toolkits along in the following overview.

The big question is off course, which one is the best? It all depends on what you need and what effort you are willing to invest (ooh how cliché!). When it comes to GUI toolkits for Ruby, there are three basic categories: system-dependant, system-independent and the category for those that won't fit elsewhere. Let's take a brief look at each category:

System-dependant: ruby-gnome2 and qtruby
These are toolkits specifically written to support a certain system, a specific window manager for example. These toolkits offer a big load of functions, sometimes not even restricted to graphics. For example, ruby-gnome2 has some audio functionality as well. The amount of available functionality and the fact that you need to understand the given window manager as well, makes these toolkits a bit complex and the learning curve steep. I would only consider to learn and use these if I really needed to use some system specific functionality that other toolkits don't provide. Otherwise I'd walk on and find something more simple which I could use in more situations.

If you need to do some qt stuff here's some info:
a book
korundrun: bindings for KDE and qt api's
KDE techbase

System-independent: fxruby and wxruby
Usually these toolkits are a layer cake of wrappers and libraries. Both are supported by many systems and allow you to code an app that looks the same on different systems. There is not much difference between these two toolkits. Fx is older which is bad because it just looks a bit dated, but on the other hand there is a decent amount of documentation, including a book on fxruby. Wx is a bit younger and looks better. One other difference is that wx is truly native, so all widgets are in the same style your window manager is. Fx looks mostly the same on different platforms. Both toolkits provide all standard GUI functions.

If you are looking for a toolkit to make mainstream GUI's I'd go for one of these. Walk on if you want something different, something that's more suited for beginners or something more fun.

The category for those that won't fit elsewhere: Monkeybars & Shoes
Monkeybars:
This toolkit is for rubyists who evolved from Javabut still want to code swing but this time using Ruby code. So if you learned Swing in a past life and don't want to learn a new GUI language again, I guess this is for you! Here's some background info:
project page
screencastic screencast

Shoes:
My personal choice and recommendation. If you don't have very specific wishes you should try shoes and see if it fits! Why? Because it's the easiest and most enjoyable. If you later find that you need something which Shoes can't do you can always choose to learn something else.
To learn Shoes you only need to take 10 steps, so stay tuned as we take 10 steps with Shoes in the following postings!

GUI toolkit extravaganza part IV: Shoes

Happy new year and all that. Yes I know, I haven't posted on my blog for ages. There's a perfectly good reason for that you know, see it was fricking freezing over here and my blog froze as well. Now the thaw has set in, time to get back at the GUI toolkit extravaganza. You do remember this GUI toolkit journey we started way back in 2008 right?...right? Well ok I guess I can't blame you, after all it has been a while and there probably were some parties...

Once upon a time, a curious ruby learner wondered what he had to do to get his ruby programs do some GUI work. The learner quickly found himself in a scary forest of GUI toolkits for Ruby. Not knowing which one to choose and frightened by the aspect of learning the wrong toolkit he decided to take a peek at each one and write down the main differences. After each of his travels he would share his journeys with GUI toolkit extravaganza episodes.

Originally the following toolkits were on the menu:

Ruby-Gnome2
FXRuby
WXRuby
Ruby Cocoa
Shoes
Monkeybars
QtRuby

Next up was to be Ruby Cocoa, but alas this is a Ruby GUI toolit for MacOS/X only and there's no apples here only bananas...

Noticed my somewhat crazy writing style with an flair of eccentricity and impressions of genius have you? Yes my sweet children, you are correct when you think this must have something to do with Shoes! You were in fact still in the scary GUI toolkit forest and now you have been kidnapped by some catbunny!

Shoes
So what's Shoes? It's crazy, it's fun it's genius! It's small and simple but powerfull. It's somewhat webbie and easy to learn. And it's ooh shiny! And most of all it's quite fun and hassle free.

ease of installation
You can get binaries for varius operating systems, source code is available and compiling is easy.

documentation
There's plenty of documentation on Shoes, and for a change it's great fun to read it! Here's what I have found so far:

Nobody Knows Shoes, the superb manual from _why, the author of Shoes in hardcopy, html or pdf.
Online shoes documentation (online as in included in the app)

The Shoes webpage includes many documentation and tutorials as well.


supported platforms
There are binaries for Linux, Mac and Windows and sources are available as well. Ubuntu has included a slightly older version in their repositories.

complexity
Shoes has been the easiest of all to learn and use. There are no complex constructs or difficult syntax issues.

functionality
Shoes offers a simple but effective toolkit. There are some things that are just not there, things like window tabs or OpenGL stuff for example. But Shoes is not a GUI toolkit in the classic sense.
Don't think too quickly you cannot do this or that because it lacks something. There's lots and lots you can do with Shoes you just need to think a bit about Human-Computer interaction and use your creativity. Yes, creativity is what Shoes is all about. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, just check Nobody Knows Shoes and the Shoe-box.

performance
No complaints here, these shoes are suited for running.

looks
Shoes apps look wonderfull. Take a look at the shoebox to get some impressions!

You can find Shoes at:
http://www.shoooes.net/