An Introduction to Shoes

• shoes
• beginner

Hello there!

Let's get started

Welcome to your first lesson about Shoes! I'm going to introduce you to the basics that Shoes brings to everyone who programs.

If you didn't know, Shoes is a Ruby toolkit that lets you build GUI programs really easy and fun!

Apps

Shoes.app

Okay! Shoes is tons of fun. It's really easy to get started. Here's the simplest Shoes app ever:

Shoes.app do
end

Give that a spin!

It's just a block

You didn't say that you wanted anything in the app, so it just gives you a blank window. You can pass options in, too:

Shoes.app :height => 200, :width => 200 do
end

This'll give you whatever sized app you want! We'll be putting all of the fun stuff inside of the do...end.

para

The basics

Blank windows are pretty boring, so let's spice it up with some text!

Shoes.app do
  para "Hello, world"
end

You know what to do by now. para is short for 'paragraph.' It lets you place text in your apps.

para and other Shoes widgets take bunches of options, too. Check it:

Shoes.app do
  para "Hello there, world", :font => "TakaoGothic"
end

stacks

They're default!

If you're looking to lay out your Shoes widgets, there are two options. The first is a stack. A Stack is the default layout a Shoes app has. So this won't look much differently than one without the stack:

Shoes.app do
  stack do
    para "Hello!"
    para "Hello!"
    para "Hello!"
  end
end

As you can see, the paras are stacked on top of each other. By itself, kinda boring, since they already do this. But...

flows

The counterpart of stacks

flows are kind of like stacks, but they go sideways rather than up and down. Try this as an example:

Shoes.app do
  flow do
    para "Hello!"
    para "Hello!"
    para "Hello!"
  end
end

Just a little bit different, eh?

stacks + flows

With their powers combined...

You can combine the stack with the flows to make whatever kind of layout you want. For example:

Shoes.app do
 flow do
    stack :width => 50 do
      para "Hello!"
      para "Hello!"
      para "Hello!"
    end
    stack :width => 50 do
      para "Goodbye!"
      para "Goodbye!"
      para "Goodbye!"
    end
  end
end

The :width attribute sets how wide the stack is. Pretty simple.

button

Push it real good

Buttons are also super simple in Shoes. Just give them a title and a bunch of code to run when they get pushed:

Shoes.app do
  button "Push me" do
    alert "Good job."
  end
end

I bet you're starting to see a pattern. Shoes loves to use blocks of code to make things super simple.

image

Pics or it didn't happen

There are two ways that you can show an image in a Shoes app. Either you have the file on your computer:

Shoes.app do
  image "#{HH::STATIC}/matz.jpg"
end

(This particular example only works if you're in Hackety Hack, by the way! Can you figure out what this does? Don't feel bad if you can't.)

Or you can also specify an image on the web:

Shoes.app do
  image "http://shoesrb.com/images/shoes-icon.png"
end

Either one is fine. Shoes cares not.

edit_line

Getting some input

If you'd like to let someone type something in a box, well, edit_line is right up your alley!

Shoes.app do
  edit_line
end

This is sort of boring though... why not get the information from the box?

Shoes.app do
  line = edit_line
  button "Push me!" do
    alert line.text
  end
end

Summary

Great job!

There's a ton more things that you can do with Shoes, but you've got the basics down!

If you'd like to learn more, you can visit the Shoes website or press Control-M (or Command-M) to bring up the Shoes Manual.