There are a couple of difficulties for people who try to use Shoes
with the knowledge that it is Ruby based. The first is that for
"What is going on?" type diagnostics, they are likely to use puts.
Many ruby examples do just that. The trouble with that is that in
shoes the output doesn't go anywhere. I'd suggest that it should go
to the errors console if there is no tty, or maybe regardless of
whether there is a tty because people forget conditionals.
The second problem is the errors console is pretty secretive.
"Shoes: sneaking a console through the system" to paraphrase a much
missed blog :-) If you know <alt-/> all is well (unless your
keyboard code eats those, as mine does in one program I was playing
with). My suggestion is that it should be put into the Window menu,
where people will be likely to discover it. This fits in with
Donald Norman's design principles about putting knowledge in the
world where people will look for it.
I don't know how easy these things are to achieve, though, as I
don't do much cross platform GUI stuff.
Hugh
