A binary clock in Ruby using Shoes

When Shoes – a “tiny graphics toolkit for Ruby” – first came out a month or two ago, I was excited, but didn’t really have much to do with it. Then it hit me – I love my Binary Clock on my iGoogle home page – why not build one?

The first thing to learn about Shoes is that you can stack things and then save them basically as an array. Since a binary clock has 6 columns, I created a variable for each column which contained the squares. This looked like:


@hours2 = stack {
  fill @fill
  4.times do |i|
    rect :left => @left, :top => (@top - (i*@offset)), :width => @width
  end
}


Which says to create a stack with the fill color of our fill, and draw four rectangles, bottom up.

Next, I had to figure out which images to turn on. The code to flip the seconds looked like:


sec = now.sec.to_s.split(//)
sec1 = []
sec1 = get_image_pos_to_turn_on(sec[0]) if sec.length > 1
sec2 = get_image_pos_to_turn_on(sec[sec.length-1])
turn_on_images(@seconds1, sec1)
turn_on_images(@seconds2, sec2)


Which isn’t all that pretty, but works. For example, the get_image_pos_to_turn_on method is just this:


def get_image_pos_to_turn_on(num)
  images = []
  images = [0] if num == "1"
  images = [1] if num == "2"
  images = [0,1] if num == "3"
  images = [2] if num == "4"
  images = [0,2] if num == "5"
  images = [1,2] if num == "6"
  images = [0,1,2] if num == "7"
  images = [3] if num == "8"
  images = [0,3] if num == "9"
  return images
end


And, well, that’s it. Which is the beauty of the Shoes app. It makes simple things simple. Here’s a screen shot of it in action:

You can download the full source code from here: binary_clock.rb. You’ll also need to download Shoes from the above link, and run the app by doing shoes binary_clock.rb.

And, this being my first Shoes app, I’m more than happy to take comments and suggestions for better ways to do it. Considering I did this whole thing in about 30 minutes with having barely looked at Shoes before, I’m pretty happy.