It might be collectively slow progress, but progress is being made on the next version of Shoes, Policeman.
Ashbb, continues his excellent work on the Windows side of things. MinGW is now the recommended build route, which although currently a bit more buggy that the old WDK route, should make things easier in the future.
OSX was struggling. Although I am really interested in Shoes, I have no discernible OSX programming skills (you can even drop the OSX from that if you want ;-) ) and only have limited access to OSX PPC (and PPC Macs are the way of the dinosaur). So although I could build and test on OSX PPC, everyone else was on 10.6, but unable to build because of the Carbon code Shoes used. We tried the route of building as 32-Bit and got no where. Now, all of a sudden, things are looking great:
- We have someone who has popped up to do 10.5 Intel Builds.
- I finally got a chance to rebuild and update the deps for OSX PPC. And can now knock out recent builds.
- And a saviour appeared who could actually re-write the Carbon stuff in Cocoa and get it to build on Snow Leopard.
Packaging, arguably one of the desirable features of Shoes was (is) a messy situation on Policeman due to changes in Ruby 1.9, but ashbb and Cecil Coupe have made progress there.
Fingers crossed we can release Policeman soon, although we might have to release with just Shy file packaging first of all.