The Curious Look

January 9th 14:55
by why

Well, that’s pretty wild. Simultaneous to yesterday’s Shoes release, there’s a big article exploring a little Shoes app on O’Reilly’s site by Gregory Brown and Brad Ediger. And it goes through Shoes and Merb together. Let us be friends, Merb. Anyway, you’ve probably already seen it.

I totally have no complaints with the article, writing those long articles has got to take forever. I just wanted to post another screenshot of Shoes here, because I think those could be better.

So, this example is actually really close to the pastebin example given in the article. This one’s the start of a clone of Chris Wanstrath’s PJ Hyett’s vJot site, which is sort of a pastebin, too. You paste a title and a full entry and it saves as it goes.

This example doesn’t save to disk, so the code focuses on just adding new elements and handling link clicks. And this example here was a big part of shaping the new Curious look and shaping some new features in Shoes.

  • Scroll panes. The link list in the middle is a fixed-height stack. It’s 200 pixels high. And when its contents grow longer than that, a vertical scroll bar shows. (Shoes doesn’t do horizontal scrollbars.)
  • Change events. This example saves as you type. This is done by tacking a block on to the edit_line or edit_box. And the block is executed with each keystroke.
  • Dynamic link text. The link text is altered as you type.
  • Curved borders and backgrounds. This is rather minor, but you can supply a :radius option to any border or background. Perhaps we will see a plethora of decorative corners for Shoes!!

Perhaps Shoes is already a bit antiquated since most programming has moved to the web already. Who knows the future of desktop apps. I guess I figure that, when it comes to learning and to hobby, it doesn’t matter whether it’s running far or near. The code with the least resistance and the most action wins.

I’m not saying Shoes is that code. But maybe Shoes will inspire something new, just as NodeBox and Processing and REBOL/View have inspired Shoes.

Now begin the comments …

12 comments

PJ

said on January 9th 17:19

a clone of a clone, when will the madness end?!

the_hack

said on January 9th 19:20

"Perhaps Shoes is already a bit antiquated since most programming has moved to the web already…’

I wouldn’t say antiquated. I like shoes because it’s helping me to do something I wouldn’t otherwise.

Hackety Hack inspired me to learn Rails and now shoes is teaching me to better understand how ruby actually works.

I think what I am saying is that the sum of Shoes’ good points are greater than its parts. Let’s not define its usefulness too narrowly–which brings me to another point: count me as one more vote for a shoes gem. That is my NOVICE opinion!

_why

said on January 9th 19:53

PJ: I have done my homework. Now I realize. I err’d the blog.

the_hack: I understand where you’re coming from. I’m a novice, too. (In the making-a-gem department.)

Gregory Brown

said on January 9th 21:42

_why, to be fair… Brad Ediger wrote most of the shoes stuff for this article, so you may want to cred him. (I focused on the merb stuff).

This screenshot is definitely prettier, with us about 2 times over our article length limit… we sadly didn’t have room for pretty. :)

Brad Ediger

said on January 9th 22:07

Well, Greg did thoroughly rebuke me for my original version that monkeypatched both Shoes and Merb. Apparently such skin-tight coupling of vastly disparate components is a bad thing these days?

And I know my screenshots don’t have a tenth of the sex appeal that yours do, but hey, people still need to buy the book, right?

_why

said on January 9th 23:12

Brad: Many apologies. I can’t believe this! I screwed up all the names in this article. Woe is me!

RyanTM

said on January 9th 23:51

Well. Now you agree that “shoes is a monkey on LSD” (Quote from that big article about shoes and merb).

MenTaLguY

said on January 10th 12:49

Hm, there’s a fencepost error with the border-versus-background thing in the above example: there’s a one-pixel leakage of background past the border to the right and to the bottom. I’m guessing you need to internally make backgrounds smaller by a pixel or else borders larger by that same amount.

MenTaLguY

said on January 10th 14:17

Actually, I think the curved borders/backgrounds are rather big news since they remove the need for a log of ugly image hacks. I think that’s worth a lot more than it might look on face value.

defunkt

said on January 10th 16:14

This is great, Shoes is growing up so fast!

tripdragon

said on January 10th 18:21

Now,,, Can shoes make titlebarless apps Apples Widgets ? Or Vistas Gadgets? That way we could make Hud like programs

_eric

said on January 10th 20:33

Is there a way with this release of Shoes to make use of other gems?

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