Just discovered Shoes, the lightweight GUI toolkit writte by why the lucky stiff. Unfortunately, I seem to have a very old version of it included in Debian Lenny and it doesn’t seem as if the one in Sid is any newer. Oh well, that didn’t stop me from writing a little app which, in addition to look pretty ok, also grabs the ten top trends using the Twitter API. It uses a regex to parse out the JSON and then display it. Looks like this: [caption id=”attachment_438” align=”aligncenter” width=”708” caption=”Yes, I know GTK widgets are ugly and that button only looks sort-of ok being styled by Qt dynamically.”][/caption] In any case, I downloaded Shoes2 (Raisins) and it works wonderfully as it’s self-contained and doesn’t interfere with Debian’s packaging system. I might just package up my little toy twitter app and see how that works on other machines. I had some trouble getting the packager going from the command line but I got it working like this: shoes2.run -- --package I spent almost as much time figuring out the code to fetch the JSON and use regular expressions to parse out the bits that I wanted than I spent learning the basics of Shoes and getting the app working. To be honest, there was more effort spent tweaking than anything else. Shoes is quite flexible and clearly useful for a couple of neat purposes. With time, I could even see it being used for a couple “serious” apps.