Member Avatar for iamthwee

Well, I was trawling through a bunch of tutorials trying think about a simple way to create a GUI programme.

Something that works on windows, mac and linux and most importantly looks native. Something simple.

Trawling through the ends and end of crap, wxwidgets, QT, cocoa, python.

And I stumbled across shoes!!

I installed in osx and I'm way impressed.

It is so simple to create a simple desktop app. Don't be fooled by the crappy logo image on the homepage. Check it out and you won't every dislike GUI programming again.

Seriously, what a find!

http://shoesrb.com/

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Member Avatar for JasonHippy

Nice find. Never heard of that one before! Will check it out at some point. Not done a lot of ruby programming. Would be a great excuse to give it another go!

Edited by JasonHippy
Member Avatar for HiHe

We make it mildly easier to write a GUI program, but you have to learn the somewhat obscure Ruby language. This must be an early April joke.

Member Avatar for Gribouillis

Yes it looks like an experimental module by a famous ruby guru. Is it still developped ?

Edited by Gribouillis
Member Avatar for iamthwee

Yes it looks like an experimental module by a famous ruby guru. Is it still developped ?

by _why apparently not, he's long gone. Isn't ruby somewhat close to python HeHe, I thought you'd be comfortable with it?

I mean it is a very limited GUI desktop app, but most people just want a simple app that has a text box and button, and they don't want to download a stupid dotnet framework or java framework, or learn QT which doesn't look native or cocoa which involves tonnes of installs and isn't cross platform

Plus this thing looks good native/ is native?

And the syntax is dead easy.

My only gripe is the installer, you can't reliably package this as a stand alone exe or dmg. And the .shy files are broke on OSX.

The easiest way to deploy this is to get your end user to install shoes for their platform. (the installer is small compared to the dotnet frameworks and such) Then they should be able to double click the file to launch it.

Plus you can add ruby gems to enhance it.

Edited by iamthwee
Member Avatar for iamthwee

I mean look how good it looks natively, on windows xp
with just a couple lines of code:

Shoes.app {
    @push = button "Push me"
    @note = para "Nothing pushed so far"
  }
Untitled.png 27.4 KB
Edited by iamthwee
Member Avatar for Gribouillis

If you only want simple things such as buttons, entries, choices etc, I discovered guidata recently which is extremely easy to use. It is based on Qt in python but you don't need to learn Qt.

Member Avatar for stultuske

Why did this thread remind me of this?

Member Avatar for ddanbe

I could do this even some 10 and more years ago, without writing any code in VS! So what does Shoes make stand out? Shoes.png

Member Avatar for ddanbe

After watching the vid some 40 and minutes, sorry, I'm not convinced.

Member Avatar for iamthwee

After watching the vid some 40 and minutes, sorry, I'm not convinced.

Ahh, that's a shame...

One of the key concepts that had me sold from the get go, was no bloated dotnet or java frameworks/JVMs.

Two and most important although others would disagree is native look and feel on all OS. QT I'm afraid just doesn't cut it and java tries but more often fails and dotnet... well let's not go there it is only for microsoft.

Third is the code, by gum is it simple, if you've looked at QT or wxwidgets or cocoa, you need some sort or degree to understand and wade through that crap. I've never used ruby before but it is a breeze to get my head around.

If you only want to string together basic apps, for myself or maybe an end user, this makes perfect sense.

Don't get me wrong there are many more options with other toolkits, but this hits the sweet spot with me. It ticks all the boxes, well the packager to compile to dmgs and exes need a lot of work, but other than that I can reliably deploy a GUI app on all OS's without the bloatware.

Edited by iamthwee
Member Avatar for vegaseat

The SharpDevelop IDE is a drag and drop GUI builder that writes most of the code for you either in C# or IronPython. With Mono it should work on Linux too?

Member Avatar for iamthwee

Thanks vegaseat that's awesome, for some reason I thought sharp develop was to do with flash, some vague recollection of times gone by. I'll be sure to investigate it .

Member Avatar for iamthwee

Just found another rather interesting video

http://media.eurucamp.org/#talk-2013-PragTob

Also was thinking about doing a mini tutorial series on DW in the software dev section. We'll see.

Edited by iamthwee
Member Avatar for vegaseat

@iamthwee
my webroot antivirus program tells me not to go to this website! Considers it unsafe and loaded with malware.

Member Avatar for iamthwee

You mean the link above, could be, I'm pretty safe as I'm browsing it from linux.

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