iHack, therefore iBlog

A big thank you and welcome to everyone who’s joining the Shoes community for ShoesFest 2008. On Friday, July 11th and 25th (local times vary), we are encouraging people with or without programming experience to join us in creating and running Shoes programs on Mac, Windows, and Linux so they can email us with feedback about:

• crashers
• platform compatibility issues
• performance bottlenecks
• confusing, missing, or under-documented APIs

Here’s Ten Steps for making the most of your involvement in ShoeFest, whether for one hour or twenty-four:

1. Download Shoes for Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux
2. Read _why’s answers to common questions
3. Use an IRC client to join the discussion on irc://irc.freenode.net#shoes
4. Try one of the Shoes Tutorials people have written
5. Read and run a few of the included samples, or programs from The Shoebox
6. Scan Nobody Knows Shoes, and review the poster of the most common APIs
7. Use `shoes -m` to bring up the manual (On OS X, you can do ⌘-?)
8. Modify/extend an existing app to try out particular APIs or techniques
9. Write your own Shoes app. It could illustrate use of a particular API, replicate a similar app on another platform, or just be something you’ve always wanted to write 
10. File bugs by emailing shoes AT code.whytheluckystiff.net; copy why AT whytheluckystiff.net if you’d like to be permanently added to that mailing list