Shoes 3.2.22 has been released. Download from the normal place

As always with Shoes 3.2 we added some new stuff and we fixed some bugs. Some of the changes below took a long time to accomplish, but we did it and we think you’ll like it.

New with 3.2.22

• Discovered a Slider widget (Shoes element) that no one documented. Bug report
• Documented image effects. Cool stuff that was mostly unknown. Bug report
• Added (minimal) documentation for fullscreen, set_window_title, set_window_icon_path for special situations.
• Enabled Gtk2 theme engine on Windows. Better looking UI. Can be changed by a knowledable user. Bug report
• The Ruby gdbm gem included with Shoes doesn’t have ancient gdbm compatabibility It’s a feature you probably don’t care about. Bug report
• alert, ask, confirm dialogs can change the “Shoes says” and “Shoes asks”
  title string to a user given string (or default) or to none at all.Bug report

Bugs fixed in 3.2.22

• Fixed a crash in samples/simple-sphere.rb when running on 64 bit systems. Bug report
• OSX: edit_lines would screw up the appearance of later elements. Bug report
• Windows: Cleaned up many font problems and console warnings. Bugs: here, here and here.
• OSX: Radio Buttons (and groups of) now work. Bug report.

Developer improvements in 3.2.22

• create VERSION.txt like Shoes used to do. Bug report
• add git based release numbers. Bug report.
• continue cleanup of rakefiles. Many consistency fixes. Added ability to configure some builds with a xxxx-custom.yaml that won’t be overwritten with a git fetch or pull. Bug report and wiki article.
• built newer dependencies for Windows. Wiki article..

Enjoy! And post your bugs here because we can’t fix what you want if we don’t know what you want.

P.S.
It’s getting easier and easier to be a Shoes maintainer so consider joining us. If you need the binary dependencies for Windows, that’s ShoesDeps.zip. Hardcore folks might want the source code and configure scripts to do it them selves. Provided. Desperate for osx 10.6 compatible libraries? Here they are.

I know it seems quiet. That’s because we’ve been working. I’m confident enough to start talking about what will be in the Shoes 3.2.22 release. There will be more included than what I describe below but there’s some improvements that I know will make the cut.

samples/simple-spere.rb works again! @passenger94 fixed the C code for the image transforms that lurked undocumented (and unfixed) for many, many years. They’ve been dead forso long that no one knew anything about them.

For Windows, Shoes will look a lot more like a Microsoft loving application. It looked OK before but that’s just because we are used to dealing with whatever a website gives us. You know, if it works, that’s good enough. There are higher standards. OSX apps should look like OSX apps and Microsoft apps should look like Microsoft apps. Shoes on Windows looks a lot more like something that belongs on Windows. There was a lot work to get that to happen.

We fixed some font issues with Windows. You might not know of the problems but they were there.

There are also changes to the manual (of course) and changes to the wiki (of course).

We’ve made it easier to compile Shoes from source. No it’s not super easy yet, but it is much easier. Easy enough for any C developer or would be C developer to join the project. Send me an email or just get a github account add your thoughts to the bug reports or open and issue.

There used to be a Management Speak phrase – Constant Improvement. It was all the rage back then and nobody but Management knew what it meant – even the Managers didn’t know or agree what it meant. Shoes 3.2 does fit my definition of Constant Improvement. Some bug fixes here and there, some infrastructure work to keep it current and sustainable (new buzz word alert). Add some paint and change the curtains. Add some new features.

I’d write more but I’ve got one more bug to fix so I can close half a dozen bug reports at once. I really, really want to do that.

Time to write something to let every know that we’re still alive and working on the next release. What’s in the next release? So far, nothing most of you would see. Under the covers I’ve one a lot of work cleaning up the build process. It’s better now but it was low hurdle. Yet it needed to be done because it won’t fix itself.

There’s also some Windows issues most of you wouldn’t bother to file bug reports on that are really symptoms of my half assed port to Windows/Gtk2. a Brilliant Idea but not really finished properly. I decided to build a set of Shoes/Windows dependencies from source rather than relying on 5 year old pre-compiled dll’s. Some of them are a little long in the tooth and one of them (expat) is not maintained but has a replacement (libxml) we don’t use. Many of them have had minor features added and bug fixes in the those 5 years. Like I said early, some Windows bugs need fixing. Upgrading the dependencies to what we use in Linux and OSX (or even more current). We also learn how Windows/GTK was put together back then and how to do it know. Important information we will need in the future.

As the headline noted, the current version of Shoes runs just fine on the new Raspberry 2. It is faster. The hackety hack opening screen animations still say “fix this” to me but after that it’s a very pleasant platform and Shoes runs fine. I haven’t had time to see if I can build a new version of Shoes that makes use of the new cpu (a Ruby issue, not Shoes).