Ruby Tuesday #11 Update : First Steps with Shoes

When I left my last post, I had been encountering some crashes with Shoes.  So, I took the Ruby code I’d written, installed Shoes on a Mac (running Leopard) and, hey presto, it worked.  I haven’t tested another Vista PC to see if it’s Shoes or the PC I was using.  Here’s the code:

require 'Twitter'

translator = Translator.new
client = Client.new

Shoes.app :title => "Twitter Shoes", :height => 750, :width => 750 do
  background rgb(240, 250, 208 )
  stack :width => 700, :height => 1.0, :margin => 20 do
    background "#eee", :radius => 12
    border "#00D0FF", :strokewidth => 3, :radius => 12
    stack :margin => 20 do
      button "Get Timeline" do
        alert("Username is {#@username.text} and password is {#@password.text}")
        timeline = ""
        translator.xml_to_tweets(client.download_friends_timeline(@username.text, @password.text)).each do |tweet|
        timeline << "#{tweet.user.screen_name} says #{tweet.text}\n\n"
      end
      @label.replace timeline
      #alert "done"
    end
  end
  stack :height => 550, :margin => 20 do
    background "#eee"
    @label = para ""
  end
  stack :margin =>20 do
    @username = edit_line :height =>50, :width => 100
    @password = edit_line :secret => true, :height =>50, :width => 100
   end
 end
end

So, what needs to be done next now is to provide a way to tweet from the Shoes form.  And it could do with some tidying up.

To help if you’re following this series, I’ve posted the source files for Twitter.rb and App.rb.

Oh, and there’s a space between 208 and the closing bracket in the line beginning background because if I don’t put the space in, WordPress converts the sequence 8 followed by a bracket to a smiley face wearing sunglasses.  Like this .  Which looks a bit weird in code.