PanaGeek

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!