PanaGeek

Test post from my Nokia 770.

Test post from my Nokia 770.

Shoes is a lightweight GUI framework for Ruby, created by _why. I don’t always understand his unique sense of humor, but he has created a great little package for creating simple GUI’s.

To use it, download the package and install it where ever you want. I put it in “Applications” on OSX, and in my user directory on Windows. Then just double click the icon; this will bring up a menu allowing you to select a file to run. Shoes comes with a healthy collection of samples that you can work through to learn the Shoes syntax.

The basic syntax is pure Ruby goodness – clean and simple. Here is a simple example of a button and a text field:

Shoes.app :height => 200, :width => 200 do
stack :margin => 10 do
button “Button One” do
@mytextfield.replace “Button One pressed!”
end
@mytextfield = para “This is a test.”
end
end

Which looks like this when it runs:

Try it out. I think it’s a great tool for creating simple GUI’s!

I know, long time, no post – and now just a short post. Well, things have been pretty busy here, and I have a lot of things to post about, so here goes.

A couple of months ago, a friend showed me his Nokia 770. And I thought, “I don’t need anything like that.” So, it was only a matter of days before I found one on eBay. The bottom line is that it is like a ‘92 Jeep Cherokee – sure there are newer, fancier models out there, but this one got it right.

In a nutshell, it’s a handheld PC that runs Linux. It’s not a PDA by design, but it has a lot of really neat apps that make it a great all around geek must-have. I can sync my Google calendars, read spreadsheets and documents, download Google maps, and even make phone calls with Gizmo!

These listed for several hundred dollars when they first came out, but since they have been superseded by the Nokia 800 and 810, they are a real bargain on eBay.