_why wrote:
No, there is no copy-and-paste for textblocks. Sadly, it won't be a
part of the next release either. I'm thinking of moving away from
Pango so that I can use each operating system's native text to
accomplish this.
I think it's interesting that this feature comes up every few months
even though many GUI toolkits have neither good text-flowing methods
nor good copy-and-paste of such text. I don't think NodeBox or
Processing and other drawing kits have it either.
Maybe because people see Shoes as closer to AIR and the browsers?
Anyway, I want this feature, too.
_why
It seems to be that some wires have been crossed between how and why
Shoes was developed and what "the public" seems to expect of it. Let me
try and piece together a hypothesis here.
Shoes seems to be expected by "the public" to fit as a way of putting
together semi-traditional desktop applications that have a strong focus
on text[1]. However, it was not really started to satisfy that demand.
As you've pointed out, Shoes's development has been geared for putting
together capabilities similar to NodeBox or Processing for the
development of drawing-centric[2] applications.
Of course, when wrangling with these drawing problems (and they are hard
problems!) priorities must be made. While other "text-centric"
capabilities are, absolutely, desired, focus has been given to drawing,
because *that is the goal of Shoes*. Of course, Shoes development would
like to solve the basic text problems like copy-and-paste, but the
problems that motivated it are not those problems.
So where did this dissonance of expectations, this branding problem,
come from? I imagine from people seeing the toolkits Shoes works on top
of, and the simple examples involving buttons and bits of text being
shown and inferring a text-centric viewpoint from it.
Even the wealth of obviously drawing-centric examples doesn't seem to
shake this from people's minds.
Some people, looking for a way to write desktop GUIs in Ruby, see Shoes
as a way of breaking free the stultification they feel trying to write
in any other toolkit. The other toolkits exist on only one platform, or
their ruby extensions are frustrating to use or they simply do not mesh
with how we imagine Ruby code should look or, simply, they are hard to
deploy.
Shoes solves all of those problems so well that it is easy to overlook
that Shoes was really not developed with text-centric applications in mind.
Shoes solves well the problems it was motivated to solve, and is a solid
base for solving related problems. The problems of traditional,
text-centric GUI development simply are not what motivated its
development. The goals of the public, admiring its cross-platform, easy
deploy, and ruby focused mindset but wanting text-centric applications,
and the motivating goals of Shoes are simply not aligned.
This, at least, is my hypothesis as to why people clamor for something
that isn't important to toolkits similar to Shoes. Shoes is simply too
well done in so many other, crucial regards, too far beyond the other
options available, for people to not want it to do the text stuff, too.
[1] email clients, chat logs, etc.
[2] This is probably a terrible description of them, but the only other
adjectives I come up with are things like "artsy", "innovative UIs" etc.
So, "drawing-centric" it is.
--
Jeff
