Hi,
I might be able to help with Shoes on Mac OS X. I am pretty competent with Cocoa and C, and have worked with Carbon a few times, too. The main problem I'd have with helping is that I can't run 10.5 Leopard, as I run a G3 iBook, but other than than I can give guidance as to the HIG and making things all shiny and Mac-like (I'm a bit of a geek like that). The focussing problem you've had when displaying windows from the command line is something I've encountered myself before, and I couldn't find a work-around. My guess is that this is standard behaviour and that you're just not meant to run GUI apps from the command line on OS X. I'd suggest that, instead, it'd be better to make using Shoes.app more convenient, for example by being able to run different apps without having to close the main Shoes application between each one. Also, it'd be nice to be able to drag a .rb file onto the Shoes application to launch it. I'll try to have a look to see how I can help to do this soon (hopefully over the weekend). As regards the sample apps, I've run them all and tried to describe the problems I've had with a few of them. The others work as expected. Anyway, these are the problems I've had: Book.rb crashes upon launch. At first I thought this was because I was running Shoes.app from /Applications/ and loading the samples from the disk image, and the path to the yaml file was relative to shoes-bin. But it crashes seemingly wherever I run the app from. That paths are relative to the application path could be a problem on the Mac, as storing data in /Applications/ is generally frowned upon. Distribution and installation via disk images is without doubt the proper and preferred way of doing things, though. Perhaps there could be a simple way of saving/loading data, so that its location is opaque, unknown to the user/developer, and so could change from platform to platform depending on convention? Or perhaps such a thing already exists and I don't know about it. :-) I also suppose that you don't want to make many more big changes with NKS already in people's hands. In dialogs.rb, the "Ask" button doesn't do anything, just returns/prints true. Mask.rb is just a white window with nothing in it. Scrolling behaviour in edit.rb isn't quite right. I'll try to describe as best I can what goes wrong, although I have no idea if this is any different from any other platform. When entering the first line that's off-screen, the scrollbar is shown, but the para doesn't scroll down to show the new text, which remains off-screen. Also, when entering new lines after that, the size of the scroller doesn't update (i.e. shrink) until it is moved. Scrollbars don't support clicking in an area above or below the scroller in order to move a page up or down, although they do support option-clicking to scroll to a specific location (which is very desirable). I also find that scrollbars don't appear in general in edit boxes. Perhaps I'm not passing a parameter that I should be, I don't know. I signed up to the mailing list half way through a discussion on scrollbars, so perhaps it's not Mac-specific. Apart from those few, the other sample apps work spiffingly. Oh, and I'm using Curious, not the latest svn. I'll get that going over the weekend and report if anything's different. You may well have fixed some or all of these issues already. Hope this helps, James On 01/02/2008, why the lucky stiff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 04:39:49PM -0600, John Wise wrote: > > _why you've talked about the problems you've had in the past with OSX. > > Is there some page that has a synopsis of these or could you re > > mention your main problems here in this thread or a new one? > > Ohh, well yes, I'm glad you asked. > > In general, the biggest problem is that I don't use OS X, so I'm not > saavy to what the OS X experience should be like. I could really > use a couple OS X users who can outline every way that Shoes can > improve for OS X. > > This is a daunting task, though, since Shoes doesn't work very well > on OS X to begin with and since there is so much C. (However, I am > dying to get some Cocoa in there!) I am trying to get up to speed > and improve things, but it's a struggle and things would go faster > if I could get some help from a real Apple dev. > > Now, for specific troubles: > > * The Info.plist launches the Shoes app. Due to a very strange > focusing problem, Shoes usually won't run from the command line. > <http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/ticket/73> > > * There are repainting issues. > <http://lethain.com/entry/2008/jan/10/odors-shoes-curious-os-x-104/> > > * A custom "ask" dialog must be assembled. > <http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/ticket/19> > > * Launching .shy files doesn't work. > > * Multiple window support is broken. > > * Cairo gradients won't scale properly. > (Something I might need to raise with the Cairo team.) > > These are just the matters which have been reported. I hear > allusion on blog spots to other more severe problems which have yet > to be described. I'm also not sure the .dmg is the best way to > install, I've heard some complaints about that. > > Not being an OS X user (and not being a very assertive or > opinionated person,) I need some help making an informed decision, > you know? > > _why > >
