Feet Hurting? Try Shoes.

From Cuberick

The path to a working GUI application is often strewn with broken Chihuly sculptures and jagged discarded fish tank coral. This is where shoes, _why's tiny windowing toolkit, comes in. Last September I gave a presentation on shoes to the chicago ruby user group. Since then it has come a long way! Here are some of the awesome new features that have come along.

• Applications automagically resolve dependencies via gems.
• Shoes applications can be packaged up as .exe or .dmg for creating distributable binaries.
• The manual is coming along nicely. Three cheers for documentation!
• Custom first class widgets can be created in ruby code.
  

The most important thing about shoes is how damn easy it is. You can write a useful application in just a few lines of easy to understand code! For proof of that check this out:

#Source code borrowed from this useful article here
Shoes.app do
button( 'play' ){ @v.play }
button( 'pause' ){ @v.pause }
button( 'stop' ){ @v.stop }
@v = video "superbad.divx", :width => "100%"
end

Here is a screenshot of that in action:

See? No Chihuly sculptures in there, and no jagged discarded fish tank coral. I recently knocked together a simple shoes app for score keeping score at a local video game tournament. It tries for a funky retro look. Put on your safari helmet and head over here to see it. Real live shoes code in the wild!