[FR-devel] Greetings from a new member

[Kevin Smith]

Hello all. My name is Kevin Smith, and I've worked with Ruby on and off
for the last three years or so. Like someone else recently, I jumped
straight from C++ to Ruby, and those two languages remain my favorites.

My interest here is less with freeride itself, and more with wxruby. I
am still looking for that elusive "ideal" gui toolkit for Ruby. It has
to be free (as in speech), cross-platform, have an elegant API, be
attractive on-screen, and have a reasonable widget collection.

For me, the main drawback of FLTK and FOX is that they do not use native
widgets, which has the unfortunate effect of making them inaccessible to
blind and low-vision users. I work for a non-profit that builds software
for blind folks, which has made me aware of this situation.

Currently, GTK shares this problem as well. There is quite a bit of
accessibility work underway to try to solve it, but that work is
progressing very slowly. None of the other powerful toolkits seem to be
in a position to solve this problem without major effort.

I helped develop Ruby/FLTK, and wrote the GTK section of Hal Fulton's
Ruby book. I have written a couple GTK Ruby apps, and ported one to
FLTK. I also worked pretty intensely with wxWindows under C++ for a few
months, back in 1998. And I've been using Java Swing for over a year.

Anyway, since I couldn't find an active wxruby forum, and because I am
also interested in freeride itself, I thought I should join this list.

Kevin