Hello all,
I’m writing an Open Source Internet-Cafe style kiosk system for
public libraries in Ruby. I’m trying to find a gui toolkit that will fit
my needs, and hours of googling have given me little incite. Here is
what it needs to do.
Display a login screen for username/password. This screen needs to
take over the entire desktop, and not allow task switching or anything
of the like.
A small window or menu applet to let users know how much time they
have left.
Small popup alerts when time is getting low.
This program needs to run on Linux/KDE and Windows.
Part 1 is what I can’t figure out. At first, I was going to use Tk, but
I can’t find a way to do it in Tk. Then I was going to use Qt, but I’ve
found I will have many problems getting a ruby/qt application to run on
windows. Now I’m thinking of using Ruby/GTK2.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. In particular, code to implement
part 1 would be wonderful.
Display a login screen for username/password. This screen needs to
take over the entire desktop, and not allow task switching or anything
of the like.
wxRuby has a Frame#show_full_screen method which will display a Frame
(Window) across the whole screen area without any decorations such as a
title bar. It should be possible to suppress task switching using event
handling. It also has a Timer class.
Then I was going to use Qt, but I’ve
found I will have many problems getting a ruby/qt application to run on
windows. Now I’m thinking of using Ruby/GTK2.
wxRuby works with native widgets on Windows, OS X and Linux/GTK. It’s
straightforward to install (gem install wxruby); no messing around with
extra .dlls or .sos or packages.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. In particular, code to implement
part 1 would be wonderful.
require ‘wx’
Wx::App.run do
frame = Wx::Frame.new(nil)
frame.show_full_screen(true)
end
Part 1 is what I can’t figure out. At first, I was going to use Tk, but
I can’t find a way to do it in Tk. Then I was going to use Qt, but I’ve
found I will have many problems getting a ruby/qt application to run on
windows. Now I’m thinking of using Ruby/GTK2.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. In particular, code to implement
part 1 would be wonderful.
A small window or menu applet to let users know how much time they
have left.
Small popup alerts when time is getting low.
This program needs to run on Linux/KDE and Windows.
Part 1 is what I can’t figure out. At first, I was going to use Tk, but
I can’t find a way to do it in Tk. Then I was going to useQt, but I’ve
found I will have many problems getting a ruby/qtapplication to run on
windows. Now I’m thinking of using Ruby/GTK2.
Jan P. has created a Windows gem for QtRuby 1.4.9 with everything
you to just install and run, including the Qt libraries themselves.
You can download it from the QtRuby/Korundum RubyForge site: