iHack, therefore iBlog

why the lucky stiff and friends invite all interested Ruby hackers — and wannabe hackers — to join them for two 24-hour ShoesFests: 

• Friday, July 11th noon GMT to Saturday, July 12th noon GMT
• Friday, July 25th noon GMT to Saturday, July 26th noon GMT

< 8 AM New York / 5 AM San Francisco / 9 PM Tokyo / 3 PM Amsterdam >

The goal of these events is to write and share fun little applications using Shoes,  a clever little cross-platform GUI toolkit written in Ruby. This will allow us to test, document, and file bugs on how the various Shoes features work on the different supported platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac), in preparation for our next major release on July 31st, 2008.

No Ruby — or programming — experience is required; we’d love to find out how easy it is for novices to learn Shoes!  Of course, if you happen to know the Ruby C API, expert help is always appreciated.

The primary interaction will take place on the Shoes IRC channel: #shoes on irc://irc.freenode.net
You can participate using any of the many web- and native- apps for IRC.

Shoes comes with its own built-in manual.  Use `shoes -m` to bring it up.  (On OS X, you can do ⌘-?.)

Additional Resources:

• The latest Shoes binaries for Mac/Windows/Linux
• The Shoebox, a friendly place to share Shoes (and Ruby-Processing) apps in peace and harmony
• Hackety Hack, the programming tutor that motivated Shoes
• Nobody Knows Shoes, the introductory guide

Spread the word!  Everybody could use a nice set of Shoes.