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Shoes makes building little graphical programs for Mac, Windows, Linux simple
- anotherhue 3y ago> "Nobody Knows Shoes" by _why. Read this if you want to get a solid understanding of the basic concepts of Shoes. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
- flymasterv 3y ago_why is/was everything the tech world needs. Just a pure joy.
- tvink 3y agoIt kicks an immediate feeling of joy in me whenever anything related to _why is mentioned. For those who never encountered his work, I'd recommend very much checking out "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby". It doesn't matter if ruby is nothing you want to learn, it's just a fun, artistic, odd read. So is Nobody Knows Shoes, of course.
- code_biologist 3y agoAn account of _why's merry adventures from 2010: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/why-a-tale-of-a-post-modern-genius/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/why-a-tale-of-a-pos...
- nkko 3y agoO _why where art thou?
- logtempo 3y agoI have little web culture, but I always love internet stories like that. It really is a contrast to social medias. Maybe it's because on such blogs and fragment of life, it's the human that "do the internet", instead of the internet doing the human( if that makes sense?).
- jordemort 3y agoDoes this still work on current versions of Ruby? The GitHub repo looks like it has a commit as recently as 3 months ago but the project hasn't made a release to Rubygems since 2017.
- pmontra 3y agoIt seems that it works with JRuby, not with MRI. > We recommend using JRuby 9.X+, with the majority of our testing currently against 9.1. JRuby 1.7.x may work, but has been untested since 4.0.0.pre6. Your question is still appropriate because they tested with 9,1 and JRuby is at 9.4 About MRI compatibility see https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/issues/1235 https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/issues/1235
- aidog 3y agoJRuby is very cool. For CRuby I can recommend glimmer libui which works on Windows, Linux and OSX For windows packaging, check out ocran.
- suby 3y agoThat commit was updating the readme to remove a site which (presumably) was once valid but is now malicious. Looks like it's been 5 / 6 years since it's seen activity.
- adlpz 3y agoI'm curious, this is a cross-platform UI library. Does anybody know of any alternatives out here that are (if necessary) MacOS-specific but also easy to use and more "native looking"? Maybe a bit drag-and-droppy? Sometimes I want to build quick and dirty things and a whole proper Mac app on Swift is too much out of my confort zone. Maybe GTK/glade?
- krelas 3y agoHave you looked at SwiftUI?
- DinaCoder99 3y agoQT is probably the closest you'll get, and at that point you might as well just learn cocoa (or whatever the swift version is called these days, i forget)
- criddell 3y agoI used to use PythonCard but it’s been dead for about a decade now. It was inspired by HyperCard and VB, had a GUI designer, and was super simple. It used used wxWidgets for the GUI so it was native looking if you didn’t push it very hard (ie use only basic GUI elements like buttons, menus, and edit boxes). https://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/walkthrough2.html https://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/walkthrough2.html This is one of those projects where, if I were retired, I’d love to revive.
- otachack 3y agoDecker is well and alive. It does have its own programming language but the effort put into it and the project is astounding. https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker
- flymasterv 3y agoDecker is amazing, and I use it a lot, but the lack of network connectivity is unfortunate and understandable.
- 3y ago
- Lammy 3y agoAs someone who has looked at Shoes several times but never dove in, it's confusing how Shoes 4 has been the "preview version" of Shoes for, like, a decade or more. It made me actively avoid getting invested in Shoes 3 (the release promoted on the linked website) because Shoes 4 requires JRuby and I am happy with CRuby (the Ruby interpreter most people think of when they hear "Ruby"). https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/ https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/ http://www.rubydoc.info/github/shoes/shoes4 http://www.rubydoc.info/github/shoes/shoes4 No disrespect to the developers but to me it feels like taking over a GUI toolkit created "to teach programming to everyone" (to quote the Shoes 4 readme) and making it depend upon a super-complicated enterprise-focused Ruby was sort of Missing The Point™ in a huge way. Heck I couldn't even switch to JRuby if I wanted to because I <3 Ractors and JRuby still lacks CRuby 3.0 feature parity: https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/7459 https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/7459
- DinaCoder99 3y agoIn my experience, JRuby is a lot easier to work with than The C version, if only because you don't have to deal with linking to a TLS/crypto implementation.
- LuciBb 3y ago[dead]
- fuzztester 3y agoI remember trying this out back in the day when I was working on Ruby and Rails. Don't remember what the experience was like at that time. When I went to the tutorials page just now, some of the code is truncated on the left side of the screen. Probably a CSS issue.
- dang 3y agoRelated. Others? Shoes The easiest little GUI toolkit, for Ruby - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34456337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34456337 - Jan 2023 (1 comment) Shoes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675819 - June 2020 (34 comments) Shoes – An easy little GUI toolkit for Ruby - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103569 - May 2018 (36 comments) Shoes, a Ruby GUI toolkit, now has some sweet apps. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120713 - Feb 2008 (1 comment)
- Broussebar 3y agoI used Shoes two (edit: three according to git) years ago to build a small software[1]. At the time there was a version 4 ongoing heavy development based on top of JRuby but I think it’s in the same state. The version 3.3 listed here has been officially abandoned by the sole developer. At the time they wrote a blog article about stopping the project but the blog is not available anymore (it’s the link in the description of the project [2]). Already two years ago shoes 3.3 was crashing a lot unexpectedly so I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything serious. But if you want to access the documentation online I made a small website for that [3]. The official documentation is only available in the executable which isn’t great to browse. - [1] https://gitlab.com/png-glitch/legacy-glitched-factory https://gitlab.com/png-glitch/legacy-glitched-factory - [2] https://github.com/shoes/shoes3 https://github.com/shoes/shoes3 - [3] https://radoteur.frama.io/shoes-unofficial-documentation/ https://radoteur.frama.io/shoes-unofficial-documentation/
- e12e 3y ago> At the time they wrote a blog article about stopping the project but the blog is not available anymore (it’s the link in the description of the project http://web.archive.org/web/20211205200902/https://walkabout.mvmanila.com/2020/09/17/need-better-fish/ http://web.archive.org/web/20211205200902/https://walkabout.... >> As you have guessed by now, I’m not maintaining Shoes 3 anymore. I do still answer some questions on github but nothing new is likely. I owe you an explanation of why. It’s pretty simple. My health is bad and is not going to get better.
- araes 3y agoThat snipit's a little misleading without the follow-on next sentence: > The Shoes community (Shoes 3 or Shoes 4) is not growing and there is little enjoyment in working on code that no one else cares about enough to help code the internals. The underlying technology employed is evolving in ways that run counter to what Shoes is and does. It’s just time to quit. We had fun, we learned some things and we’ll leave it at that. And then a lot of text about wandering off into home automation, Arduino, and 3D printers.
- billfruit 3y ago
- bbor 3y agoDropping in with a brief note that you should please, for the love of god, not name your product after the plural of a common noun. “Shoes is a popular framework” makes my brain hurt. Nowadays is there any reason why you would do something like this instead of standing up a local devserver and delivering the gui via HTML? After using textual for a few months I’ve become pretty anti-gui for small local projects - web is just infinitely more mature and extensible than any little framework. But maybe I missing the point?
- thih9 3y ago> “Shoes is a popular framework” makes my brain hurt. It’s a matter of getting used to. Note that Rails is an even more popular framework.
- DinaCoder99 3y agoOne of my biggest gripes with Ruby (probably after the abuse of `method_missing` to add unsearchable method invocations) has got to be the naming of packages. I have no data to back this up so I might be off-base, but in my decade-plus of working with the language I have many memories of becoming frustrated because I couldn't remember a library's name or couldn't immediately figure out the function of a library I found in a Gemfile or an import. This is absolutely a problem with all modern package-oriented languages, but for whatever reason I perceive Ruby as having the worst case of it of all the ecosystems I've used.
- shaicoleman 3y agoglimmer-dsl-libui is a more actively maintained alternative https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer-dsl-libui https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer-dsl-libui How do Glimmer GUI DSLs compare to Shoes? https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer#faq https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer#faq
- mihaaly 3y agoAll (*) GUI libraries make simple UI making simple. : ) (*) Almost all. Most of them.
- adfm 3y agoIf this project is abandoned, what are the simple options for building graphical programs on Mac, Windows, and Linux?
- fuzztester 3y agowxPython is somewhat simple for at least small apps. You need to know and install Python. One plus is that it has many example apps showing use of various widget and features of the toolkit.
- brodo 3y agohttps://fyne.io/ https://fyne.io/
- oefrha 3y agoI've used fyne a couple times, and it couldn't handle something very basic: it couldn't render glyphs outside the built-in font and optionally, exactly one custom font (FYNE_FONT). Which means you're screwed or at least severely crippled if you want to support any kind of user-created content for an international user base. This problem has been brought up a million times on the issue tracker, and I don't think it has meaningfully advanced: https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne/issues/2572#issuecomment-1546104249 https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne/issues/2572#issuecomment-154...
- quickthrower2 3y agoHate to say it. Electron.
- addandsubtract 3y agoTauri: https://tauri.app/ https://tauri.app/
- al_borland 3y agoLooking at the electron documentation, it doesn’t seem nearly as beginner friendly. It mentions this… >this tutorial assumes you are generally familiar with Node and front-end web development basics. If you need to do some background reading before continuing Then goes on to say you shouldn’t just know web dev and Node, but also the CLI and git, as well as installing node.js and npm. Those are a lot of barriers to entry for a beginner who is looking for a quick win to get them to keep going.
- sureglymop 3y agoI specifically want to build a fullscreen application that has a translucent window for a quick note taking tool. An "overlay" drawing over the actual window manager if you will. Am lost as to where to start or what to use.
- LeonB 3y agoThat’s basically what one of the first apps I ever wrote did! But that was back in 1999, and it wasn’t hard to choose a framework, Visual Basic 6 was so fun and easy. If I wrote it today I’d use .net, and im not sure if it’d work on Mac/Linux too, but maybe it would.
- douchescript 3y agoI do like ruby a lot but I never grokked what was so great about _why, even though I coded ruby when he was active. Felt like a cargo cult. Maybe it was the depressive vibe of his stuff.
- alcidesfonseca 3y agoHe was a poet who could code. Not a software engineer. (disclaimer: I really like most of his ruby stuff)
- atonse 3y agoSame here. I never understood why the poignant guide is so loved. I could never get past the first couple pages cuz it felt so random. Always thought I was missing something.
- amelius 3y agoI want this, but for iOS and Android.
- e12e 3y agoThere was Dragon ruby and rubymotion - but I think they are also defunct?
- otachack 3y agoDragonRuby is not defunct and actively receives updates. It also sponsored several game jams. The last update, according to their Discord, was on January 25th 2024. RubyMotion I can't really vouch for.
- riffraff 3y agoDragonruby is actively developed and quite fun to work with, but I'm not sure it's the same thing.
- nopcode 3y agoI recently used platypus [1] to turn a ruby script into a macos menubar app. Something for which I wish there was a windows variant... Embedding a script into a small tray icon/menubar app can be extremely powerfull even with its low complexity. [1]: https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Platypus https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Platypus
- madduci 3y agoIt looks like an already dead technology. Shoes 4 runs on Java and JRuby and the website states that JRuby 9 doesn't work with Java 9+ plus yet, which is in turn amazing, since we are close to Java 22 now more than Java 8. Is this really a sustainable way to build GUIs?
- riffraff 3y agoI'm not sure shoes is sustainable, but I think jruby runs on any modern JVM, where did you get the information that it does not work on java 9+? Edit: I see, the readme for shoes4 is itself many years old.
- dartos 3y agoWOW. What a blast from the past
- Pompidou 3y agoIt look very interesting. But TK libs, available for a lot of programming languages,are still a powerful and easy way to implement gui. In my own pov, the perfect solution would be, not to import TK in various programming language, but to embed directly in a TCL environment any programming language I need.In this case, it would also be nice to access to TK components behind a oop layer.
- zubairq 3y agoI've always loved the idea of "Shoes". Can you make Shoes components that can be reused in other Shows apps too?
- throwaway892238 3y agoSad that it's not a WYSIWYG. The old Visual Basic will forever be the benchmark for how easy it is to make a GUI. If it's not that easy I don't wanna hear about it.
- jbluepolarbear 3y agoI have a lot of fond memories of Shoes and the project that spawned it Hackety Hack. I used shoes to make dnd character sheet creators, munchkin score cards, and guis for lots of board games. Hackety Hack was a fun way to learn Ruby and Shoes made it very easy to make simple guis.
- bitwize 3y agoOh my God, Shoes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCF3ywukQYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCF3ywukQYA This is up there with Tk and PySimpleGUI, UI programming as it should be.
- stemlord 3y agoCool to see a logo for an open source project that isn't terrible
- taskforcegemini 3y agocan't believe it's been ten years since I played with shoes. And recently started going down a similar rabbithole with rich/textual