Dear Shoes.
When sketching with code that tries to craft artful form, designed
layouts, or any bit of visuals that could be said to "have
aesthetics," you often litter your code with fixnums and floats. You
gotta position things right, tweak the colors, set the transparencies,
and find the right coefficients.
Something that I just committed to Ruby-Processing today, is the
notion of having a slider. (Something that Nodebox does even more
prettily.) Now, in your sketch, you can do this:
class SheepSketch
has_slider :opacity
has_slider :rams, 0..200
# code goes here
end
When you run the sketch, a small window will appear alongside, holding
sliders for the variables mentioned. When you move a slider, the
instance_variable of the same name will be adjusted through an
attribute accessor. Sliders usually go from 0 to 100, but take an
optional range, as well. It's a great way to figure out your fixnums
and floats.
Here's a screenshot of the venerable jwishy, with sliders:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/jashkenas/images/venerable_jwishy.png
So, I realize that they're not a standard part of Shoe technology
(unlike laces, eyelets, insoles, or socks) but I think that sliders,
if able to be instantly created with something simple like has_slider,
would be good for Shoes on the whole.
— omygawshkenas
