> > > Hope I'm not out in left field--any other thoughts? >
Here is my two cents... Shoes is a ruby distribution. It's only ruby distribution that allows you to pack up your ruby, your code, and gems (kind of) and ship it as a native application on the big three operating systems. IMHO this makes shoes the most innovative ruby distribution out there. There is nothing else like it. I don't think it should be a library, I think it should try even harder to be the best ruby distribution out there. It would be great if I could ship a rails application as a shoes executable. I think it would be awesome if I could run a shoes application as a daemon or a windows service. I want to be able to bundle up everything my application needs into an exe and send it to my friend and have him be able to use my application. Maybe shoes is two different platforms. Maybe it should be broken up into "the best way to distribute your ruby apps" and "the reddest, shiniest, most elaborately laced GUI framework".
