Hi all,
I'm new to shoes, just working through the examples as of yet, though
I hope to try writing cool media player with the built-in VLC
functionality. So far this GUI toolkit has been extraordinarily
pleasurable as a platform, exceeding my expectations as to how a Ruby
toolkit should work.
Anyway, so far I have only two gripes with shoes. I'm developing on
Mac and I was wondering why the launcher exists. Code that I load any
other way except through the file dialog effective becomes unreachable
and orphaned; I unfortunately have to murder the process and scuff my
shoes so to speak with a killall -9. I would really prefer to simply
be able to call 'shoes my_app.rb'. and bypass the loader dialog all
together. On that same note, ctrl-c doesn't work as expected: shoes
seemingly ignores my pleas to shutdown. While I'm completely
unqualified to fix this, I've been playing with making the start up
shoes script a little smarter, at least on MacOS X, though I wonder if
these path limitations will be alleviated in future releases after
more important bug-fixes are committed. Maybe my setup is wrong, but
all the parts seem to be in working order. Nevertheless, installing a
library like Shoes via a disk image still feels unnatural.
Secondly, is there a really pressing reason why this hasn't been
packaged as a RubyGem, even if to only be served locally from why's
repo and not generally distributed yet. I think wiring in rubygem
support would make it more awesome than it already is, thoroughly
integrating into the Ruby ecosystem. Though my experience is really
limited, I'd be more than happy to try to help out with these problems
if given a clear direction to hack against.
All the best,
Mark Baran
P.S. I experienced the best introduction to Ruby and programming in
general by Why's excellent tutorial guided by talking foxes. I really
hope that he extends it to include a mind blowing expansion featuring
Shoes! Or maybe I'll just have to wait and play with Hackety....
