Slength / Blog: Recent posts

Well, I spent most of today porting Slength to C, tomorrow I'll start writing the GUI in python, and then sometime tomorrow or the day after tomorrow I need to update the Makefiles for Slength and write a file-syncing program in perl to make it easier to package Slength for all three officially supported OS's--Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.

Okay, like no joke, I really dislike programming GUI apps... which is odd because I really want to program GUI apps... but its just not fun when you have to build an application three or four times just to get it to support more than one platform well--and above all, I believe in writing applications that perform well as consistently as possible--which means that if you download a version of app XYZ for your OS, then it should work right out of the box, lickity split, dude. You shouldn't have to hack about a bit, or worse... for a while, it should just freaking work. And that's the issue, because wxWidgets is nice and all, and I love how it always looks native--that's my favorite part--but it takes me hours or at least an hour just to get the sucker written and then I have to go in and spend the next few hours/hour tweaking how everything is positioned and sized just so that it'll work on Windows, even though it works just fine on Linux. *sigh* I should just develop my own freaking GUI widget and make it totally awesome... but I'm not desperate enough yet... *sigh*... well, it's only a matter of time... either I'll find a better way of dealing with this crap, I'll write my own crap, or I'll just give up on this crap completely... but something's definitely gonna happen.

As it turns out, I finally decided to just go with WxPython, despite the fact that I'd much rather implement Slength's GUI in Ruby. I literally just finished writing a basic GUI for Slength a few minutes ago, and I'll be packaging it and uploading it to 'Files' sometime tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

wxRuby

Well, it looks like writing the GUI in Ruby is out of the question--well, not really, but I don't think that I want to write it using wxRuby, which means that I'll be writing it in Ruby 1.9, while the current version of Slength uses Ruby 2.0... (uhh... got lost in all of these commas.)

qtRuby

Anyway, and I took a look at qtRuby and same problem.

gnome_ruby (closest thing to RubyGTK, I guess?)... read more

I'm currently in the middle of writing Slength version 2.0.0 in Ruby without all the cutesy stuff that all of the previous versions have--I'm not really sure what I was thinking when I put all that stuff in there, but I'm getting rid of it now.

I'm going to be rewriting slength using hsz as its new source-base (that is, I'd like to use hsz's arg handling and such with slength).