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/
