Shoes is a tiny graphics toolkit, designed for beginners. But make no mistake: this is real programming. You can make real, colorful apps in Shoes.
Well, what is a colorful app?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but a colorful app is one which lets you freely paint with colors! And Shoes does that. You can paint colorful shapes and images wherever you like. The entire app is a canvas.
(The above is a picture of Pixel Painter, an app written in Shoes, running on Ubuntu Linux.)
Or, paint Shoes apps with images.
Shoes has its own concurrent image cache, so images can be loaded over the web nicely.
(This app comes from the walkthrough, shown running on OS X Leopard.)
Laying out text is nice and easy.
For fonts and text, Shoes takes its cues from the web. Like HTML, Shoes will automatically flow your paragraphs, even if the app resizes. You can easily style text in bold, italics, large, small, even linked.
(This app is a sample which comes with Shoes, called class-book.rb. Here we see it running on Windows Vista.)
Shoes offers controls like buttons and textboxes.
While Shoes generally offers the same controls as browsers do (checkboxes, drop-down lists, etc.) there are also progress bars and many kinds of dialog boxes.
(This is simple-form.rb, which comes with Shoes, running on Mac OS X Tiger.)
Shoes code looks good, too!
Often as good as the app does.
Shoes.app { button("Click me!") { alert("Good job.") } }
On Linux, here's how that might look, when the button is clicked:
Put it all together and...?
More complex apps will combine painting with controls and text, such as Twittershoes.
Looks polished, right? It's one single file! 231 lines of Ruby code.
(This is Twittershoes running on Linux.)
Give out EXEs, DMGs and RUNs.
Any Shoes app can be bundled up as a single-click executable.
(This is the packager running on Ubuntu Linux.)