Just thought I'd share my first Shoes app that came out of yesterday's hacking. (I suppose I could have also mentioned that passing the bad color name to background with a flow/stack also seemed to completely black out my OS X Leopard Shoes app, but that's another story!) First, the screenshot: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3095/2801694916_1a051349b4_b.jpg (http://flickr.com/photos/wu_135/2801694916/sizes/l/)
As I mentioned on mapnik-users@, on the left, you have an image PNG rendered by Mapnik. On the right, a simple XML editor, and below a "Render!" button. (Oh and I noticed that OS X copy/paste bindings don't quite work on the text box, le sigh.) The hack works by shelling out to a pre-compiled C++ binary (although a Py script would do), which re-renders the image when you hit "Render". Here's the source code: http://gist.github.com/7382 -- it's a few dozen lines of Shoesian code. (You can download Mapnik here: http://mapnik.org/ -- and if you're curious, the image is rendered using libre/gratis USGS state boundaries (SHP) Shapefiles, with spatial geometry queried from a local PostGIS DB sourced from the OpenStreetMap project. Alas, getting that entire map-rendering stack running on a OS X machine is a little bit of a hassle, but it's slightly easier on Linux. Mapnik doesn't have any Ruby bindings yet, and the OSM planet dataset is huuuge, but perhaps one day some intrepid soul will implement a Ruby binding for Mapnik, and create a minified extract of OSM for SQLite, making it possible for Shoes'ers and HacketyHackers everywhere to more easily play with their own Maps!) ~L
