Re: + common questions as we head into shoesfest

[jonty]

Dear  _why Please be reassured!! I love shoes and will wear them for ever! The tinyness is important, I honour you for your commitment to this, as Schumacker said "Small is beautiful" It already is meeting my needs - I use it for any utility I need right now; ruby rocks and shoes is its sole mate!! _why wrote: With ShoesFest and the upcoming release, I think it would be good to talk about some common stuff people are going to bring up and what the general feeling is about Shoes right now. <snip> == TINYNESS == Is Shoes going to get new widgets? Menus? Toolbars? OpenGL? Doubtful. Menus, maybe. But keep in mind that Shoes has about the same number of controls as HTML. But, unlike HTML, you can draw your own widgets. So, actually, it's closer to Flash I guess. Shoes is already a 2-3 meg download on most platforms. I want to slim that down. Just the stuff already in Shoes keeps me very, very busy! A few quotes to back up why Shoes is small. "By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems." -- A. Whitehead (I take this to mean that you should be able to keep the basics of Shoes in your mind rather than always consulting a manual.) Syntax is often suggested as a problem area in textual languages, but in our study users reported that syntax errors were few once they were familiar… Textual languages are compact, efficient, and can be developed in less time than graphical languages. -- Bonnie Nardi (She goes on to say that textual languages are "compact" when they focus on ten basic commands and branch out from there.)