Hi!
In the past I've found the best time to getgive
a learner's perspective is when you're still a learner, so here goes...
I've around ten years coding experience; mostly C++ non-gui, but some
Smalltalk, Python, Perl, Lisp, Tcl/Tk as well. I've written GUI systems (to
run through D3D) myself. I've written a little Ruby code myself in the past,
but nothing past a 800LOC toy app, and not in the past year. As a test of
Ruby and Shoes I'm writing a flash card program on Windows.
General impressions
------------------------------
Extremely good minimal architecture - perhaps the best I've seen. Terrific
use of closures and other Ruby features.
I like Why's art - his own drawings remind me a little of Chester Brown ("Ed
The Happy Clown") and I like the "sampling" from UFO. (I'm visiting my
father this week and he has Old Person Cable - lots of channels, most of
them showing stuff from the 70's and 80's - I might check and see if I can
catch an episode.)
Biggest drawbacks
-----------------------------
No debugger. Ouch. I understand why, but ouch.
The Shoes help app is prone to slow downs or jamming, and search isn't as
good as the combination of Google and Firefox.
Some off the wall early days behaviour, but really not much.
Regarding that last - The Button Bug
-----------------------------------------------------
As an alternative to re-naming buttons (each flash card would ideally have
several multiple option buttons for questions*) which doesn't seem possible
I tried putting each button in its own stack and using the form of clear{}
that specifies a replacement. What followed wasn't nice - one of the new
Buttons went into bold for No Apparent Reason, and after a couple of clears
a Button that wasn't in one of the cleared stacks seemed to "lose" its click
behaviour block. I might have done something wrong. If anyone wabts code to
look at, please let me know. The GUI is only 40 LOC.
Btw, I think it might be nice if buttons were re-namable - this is a fairly
common need, and anything that can keep you out of GUI obect creation and
destruction, especially on a multi-platform system, is nice.
*Ie new card comes on to the screen, buttons stay but questions on the
buttons change.
