A long time without a post! Indeed. I could apologize I could explain. I could make up a story. What to do? What to do? Make up an explanation and explain too much?

There is a shoes 3.3.7 beta in the usual place. There is also a shoes 3.3.8 beta. What’s the story with that? 3.3.7 has one nasty bug for some situations – you can’t manual resize the window down after expanding it. I rarely do that myself and it only happens if the window has menus. I spent so much time trying to find that bug that I created a user layout feature for Shoes 3.3.8 which took way more time than I thought, there much more that can be done and there we are.

Menus? Shoes has menus now? It does in 3.3.7 and I love typing ^Q to quit Shoes apps. I do that a lot. I like it so much I replaced the cobbler buttons with menus. There are likely to be edge cases like that resize bug. Of course you can create and change menus for your app.

You can write shoes apps that use multiple monitors. You wouldn’t do this for machines that don’t have multiple monitors, of course.

You can (try) to provide a Gtk3 theme for Linux and Windows. I say try because it’s a lot harder that you think. Themes are often tied to ‘theme-engines’. There are several engines, not available everywhere, each with multiple versions and bugs. For Shoes we can’t depend on a theme engine so the theme has to be engine free – good luck finding one of those on the internet. Also many themes depends on the version of Gtk3. My version of GTK3 is not going to be the same as yours. Future versions of Shoes will use a newer Gtk3 version. But, if you want to write your own Shoes theme, you can do it.

There is a new settings class. Themes and monitors and menu enabling have to happen very early when shoes gets initialized so they are part of anew settings class that reads a startup.yaml file (if you have one). Note there are two user fields that someone clever could use to prevent theft or …

Merge packaging is provided from a Wizard in Cobbler. This used to be 3 scripts that only a few people knew about. It merges your app with Shoes and hides Shoes. It is NOT platform independent. Shoes Windows can merge Shoes Windows. OSX for OSX. Linux x86 for Linux x86. Each one has very unique requirements for installers. Yes, they use installers. Shoes provides some help with the installers but you’ll need to learn them. Just like a real application developer.

You might detect a theme for Shoes 3.3.7 — writing real applications. Menus, themes, installers – It’s all in the manual and see the wiki.

Everybody hits the wall on using Flows and Stacks to do layout. Your complaints (mine too) have been heard. Shoes 3.3.8 provides a general ‘layout’ class. See the wiki article and this github issue. It lets you write your own layout manager. You could do something similar with Shoes Widget class. Almost. Mostly for proof of concept, two new user layouts are provided – written in Shoes/Ruby, a simple Grid (GridBag) and something close to the AutoLayout used by Apple and some JavaScript frameworks. These are good enough to play with. AutoLayout is non-trivial – it uses the Cassowary-ruby gem to solve a group of constraints. There’s even a Visual Format Language (VFL) parser available.

That’s what I’ve been doing.

Pretty much the same as the beta. One feature, one bug fix. At the usual place

-------------- Shoes 3.3.6 -------------------------------

=== Fixed with 3.3.6
Linux versions may not have workable symlinks to .so's
https://github.com/shoes/shoes3/issues/392


As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m going into the Hospital next week for surgery. I expect recovery will take a few weeks so I’m going to be mostly offline until mid March.

A 3.3.6 beta just a few weeks after 3.3.5? What’s going on?

A couple of things. First, it fixes some show stopper bugs for a few people. Second, its adds
a feature you might care about – you can set the font and stroke color for native widgets like edit_line, edit_box, button, list_box and switch (except for BSD – it’s too special). I’ve been working on that feature for a long time – time to let people test it and I can get to other things.

Betas here.

I have also done a lot of work to clean up Shoes from a maintainer point of view. Why? Because I have been diagnosed with oral cancer and I wanted shoes internals to be clean(er) if someone else has to replace me as maintainer. Today I got the treatment plan and while nothing is scheduled yet, I’ll probably survive. I know people are curious about these things so I’ll share some information.

Almost 5 years ago I had neck cancer which involved chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. Clever people might connect the dates and think I started maintaining Shoes 3 after that ‘event’ for something to do while waiting to learn if they got all the cancer out of my neck. They would be correct. Three years later (2016) I’m pronounced cured and I’m also deep in have fun with Shoes.

I don’t know when exactly but I’ll have to travel to Salt Lake City, Utah, USA where they will cutout a chunk of my right jawbone and rebuild the jaw with a chunk of bone take from my lower leg. I’ll be there for at least a week, probably more. I know these things don’t heal all that fast so I’ll be miserable for a least a month. But, I’ll probably survive and I don’t have to suffer months of chemotherapy or radiation. Pick your misery! I’m good with this option. So one day my attention to Shoes will drop to zero and maybe a few weeks or a month later I’ll return to Shoes.

It goes without saying but I will say it again – we can always use to folks to help with Shoes 3.

Yup, another Shoes release. What’s New? systray. Moving and resizing windows. You can disable the image cache for the whole app or per image. Other than that there’s some bug fixes and some Shoes developer love. We also don’t support 32 bit linux anymore (it still builds if you really need it and are willing to do the work) We added FreesBSD 11.3 (64 bit) as a native port if you have the proper ports installed.

ChangeLog:

=== New with 3.3.4
  * Uses Ruby 2.3.4 (2.3.3 on Windows) and Rubygems 2.6.12+
    https://github.com/Shoes3/shoes3/issues/361 and
    https://github.com/Shoes3/shoes3/issues/270
  * New widget! - systray sends tiny status messages to the 
    host OS desktop.
    https://github.com/Shoes3/shoes3/issues/363
  * New platform - freebsd 11.1 (64). Can build, run, install and package for.
    https://github.com/Shoes3/shoes3/issues/365
  * Dead platform - 32 bit i686 (Linux intel) target is no longer supported
  * libcurl.dll/dylib/so and new gems are included with Shoes. require 'typhoeus'
    to use it. When net/http and open_uri is too confusing, arcane and limiting. 
    On Windows it's not faster (or slower) - just better in other ways. 
    see https://github.com/typhoeus/typhoeus
  * Method app.resize can programaticly expand the window.
    see https://github.com/Shoes3/shoes3/issues/370
  * Windows can be positioned 
    https://github.com/Shoes3/shoes3/issues/28
  * can enable/disable image cache
    https://github.com/Shoes3/shoes3/issues/323
    https://github.com/Shoes3/shoes3/issues/377
    See Advanced->appmethods in Manual.
    
=== Fixed with 3.3.4
  * When Shoes is installed on a system with existing rvm/rbenv it
    might use the wrong set of gems. 
  * Fixed some SSL issues for download and image (Windows).
    Ruby/Windows (net/http) ssl problems remain unfixed.
  * Improved Windows downloading speed - still sub-par but better than
    before. 
  * some downloaded images don't have an etag (cough, manual Image example)

=== Developer issues with 3.3.4
  * rake does a better job of dealing with changes in lib/shoes/*.rb, static/manual-en.txt
    and changes in samples/*/*.rb. You can change these without a full rebuild.
    https://github.com/Shoes3/shoes3/issues/362
  * new freebsd target (loose and tight shoes)

Other than that, nothing new. 🙂

I’ve got a set of betas for 3.3.4 for windows, osx, pi and x86_64 linux. Here

You might notice that there is no 32 bit linux – why bother? It’s pain to support and nobody uses it. OSX Mavericks (10.9) is also likely to disowned in Shoes 3.3.4. It’s a real pain in the ass. That will not happen soon. But, it will happen.

What’s in Shoes 3.3.4 beta this month?

• Systray
• Typheous
• A hack to get https urls working for Windows and OSX image and download methods.
• Windows GUI speed improvements in general, most certainly for network things. Still too slow but a whole lot better that 3.3.3. Moves the meter from ‘really sucks’ to ‘almost doesn’t suck’

It’s highly likely that Typheous will be the recommended replacement for the use of net/http and open_uri when Shoes download is insufficient for networking needs. It’s a lot more understandable to programmers who need more than what Shoes download can do. See the README.md. Improvement? I think so.

The download performance and general friskiness of 3.3.4 on Windows is noteworthy. Sucks less and I think we could do better. There are SSL reasons and ruby-bugs why you don’t want to dig into net/http and open-uri