One of the challenges of programming is interacting with the user. The terminal presents few options. I'm working on a temperature conversion program. Which so should use radio buttons. You enter the degrees enter the number, click on the degrees you want to convert to and the answer pops out. Cool so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to learn Shoes. A lightweight GUI for Ruby. But no.
Gui programming is like trying to find your way through a maze. Except blindfold, dizzy and no minotaur motivation.
This is not really a commentary on Shoes, which is actually quite easy, but on the tutorials and resources to learn it. In that there are so few and they tend to assume a high level of programming mastery.
Designing the Gui is not exactly easy but the real maze is trying to link it to a the heart of the program. I've been trying to write a program that changes the temperature from Fahrenheit to Celcius thinking this was a great place to use radio buttons or list to avoid writing something like please enter "F" and "C" to convert temperature and trying to sanitize what people write. With radio buttons I know what they're inputting.
I got as far as getting Shoes to launch a window with drop down menus for selecting the temperature (Fahrenheit or Celcius) and a convert button, but you press it and nothing happens, and I've no clue why. I need to find some better tutorials on this... Thankfully it looks like the same people that run the online course of Ruby I'm taking also will do a Ruby with Shoes class, but it's not available yet.
Gui programming is like trying to find your way through a maze. Except blindfold, dizzy and no minotaur motivation.
This is not really a commentary on Shoes, which is actually quite easy, but on the tutorials and resources to learn it. In that there are so few and they tend to assume a high level of programming mastery.
Designing the Gui is not exactly easy but the real maze is trying to link it to a the heart of the program. I've been trying to write a program that changes the temperature from Fahrenheit to Celcius thinking this was a great place to use radio buttons or list to avoid writing something like please enter "F" and "C" to convert temperature and trying to sanitize what people write. With radio buttons I know what they're inputting.
I got as far as getting Shoes to launch a window with drop down menus for selecting the temperature (Fahrenheit or Celcius) and a convert button, but you press it and nothing happens, and I've no clue why. I need to find some better tutorials on this... Thankfully it looks like the same people that run the online course of Ruby I'm taking also will do a Ruby with Shoes class, but it's not available yet.
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