Shoes makes building little graphical programs for Mac, Windows, Linux simple

• Shoes

  2 1,581 3.1 Ruby

  Shoes 4 : the next version of Shoes

  

As someone who has looked at Shoes several times but never dove in, it's confusing how Shoes 4 has been the "preview version" of Shoes for, like, a decade or more. It made me actively avoid getting invested in Shoes 3 (the release promoted on the linked website) because Shoes 4 requires JRuby and I am happy with CRuby (the Ruby interpreter most people think of when they hear "Ruby").

https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/

http://www.rubydoc.info/github/shoes/shoes4

No disrespect to the developers but to me it feels like taking over a GUI toolkit created "to teach programming to everyone" (to quote the Shoes 4 readme) and making it depend upon a super-complicated enterprise-focused Ruby was sort of Missing The Point™ in a huge way.

Heck I couldn't even switch to JRuby if I wanted to because I <3 Ractors and JRuby still lacks CRuby 3.0 feature parity: https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/7459

• JRuby

  24 3,746 9.9 Ruby

  JRuby, an implementation of Ruby on the JVM

  

As someone who has looked at Shoes several times but never dove in, it's confusing how Shoes 4 has been the "preview version" of Shoes for, like, a decade or more. It made me actively avoid getting invested in Shoes 3 (the release promoted on the linked website) because Shoes 4 requires JRuby and I am happy with CRuby (the Ruby interpreter most people think of when they hear "Ruby").

https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/

http://www.rubydoc.info/github/shoes/shoes4

No disrespect to the developers but to me it feels like taking over a GUI toolkit created "to teach programming to everyone" (to quote the Shoes 4 readme) and making it depend upon a super-complicated enterprise-focused Ruby was sort of Missing The Point™ in a huge way.

Heck I couldn't even switch to JRuby if I wanted to because I <3 Ractors and JRuby still lacks CRuby 3.0 feature parity: https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/7459

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• legacy-glitched-factory

  1 - -

But if you want to access the documentation online I made a small website for that [3]. The official documentation is only available in the executable which isn’t great to browse.

- [1] https://gitlab.com/png-glitch/legacy-glitched-factory

• shoes3

  1 174 - C

  a tiny graphical app kit for ruby

  

• glimmer-dsl-libui

  21 438 8.0 Ruby

  Glimmer DSL for LibUI - Prerequisite-Free Ruby Desktop Development Cross-Platform Native GUI Library - The Quickest Way From Zero To GUI - If You Liked Shoes, You'll Love Glimmer! - No need to pre-install any prerequisites. Just install the gem and have platform-independent GUI that just works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

glimmer-dsl-libui is a more actively maintained alternative

https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer-dsl-libui

• fyne

  150 23,280 9.6 Go

  Cross platform GUI toolkit in Go inspired by Material Design

  

• Platypus

  6 2,706 7.1 Objective-C

  Create native Mac applications from command line scripts.

Something for which I wish there was a windows variant...

Embedding a script into a small tray icon/menubar app can be extremely powerfull even with its low complexity.

[1]: https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Platypus

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• tauri

  469 77,375 9.8 Rust

  Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.

  

• why-archive

  1 36 - C

  This is an archive of things that made _why known to many on the web.

> But maybe I missing the point?

maybe. coding can be playful and computers are for everyone.

https://github.com/whymirror/why-archive/blob/master/shoes/n...

• PySimpleGUI

  49 13,116 8.0 Python

  Python GUIs for Humans! PySimpleGUI is the top-rated Python application development environment. Launched in 2018 and actively developed, maintained, and supported in 2024. Transforms tkinter, Qt, WxPython, and Remi into a simple, intuitive, and fun experience for both hobbyists and expert users.

Just a heads up: PySimpleGUI 5 isn't open source any more [0], and the official GitHub repo was replaced with a stub [1]. From the blog post, it sounds like the people behind it will probably remove the FOSS version from PyPI soon.

It's possible the community will fork it with a version of PySimpleGUI 4 that's still kicking around, but I haven't seen one yet.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369353

[1] https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI

• scarpe

  1 156 9.4 Ruby

  Scarpe - shoes but running on webview (by scarpe-team)

  

If you're specifically looking for something like Shoes, here are two similar projects in Ruby:

- Scarpe is a WIP revival of Shoes. https://github.com/scarpe-team/scarpe

• Glimmer

  24 507 8.2 Ruby

  DSL Framework consisting of a DSL Engine and a Data-Binding Library used in Glimmer DSL for SWT (JRuby Desktop Development GUI Framework), Glimmer DSL for Opal (Pure Ruby Web GUI), Glimmer DSL for LibUI (Prerequisite-Free Ruby Desktop Development GUI Library), Glimmer DSL for Tk (Ruby Tk Desktop Development GUI Library), Glimmer DSL for GTK (Ruby-GNOME Desktop Development GUI Library), Glimmer DSL for XML (& HTML), and Glimmer DSL for CSS

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