http://jewelrybox.unfiniti.com/ is down

[pboling]

As is unfiniti.com.

Does Jewelerybox need a new host @remear?

[wyoumans]

👍

[wchrisjohnson]

👍

[insha]

Has this project been abandoned?

[kevindeleon]

If so, that's unfortunate...having a GUI for RVM was nice.

[remear]

I'm glad to hear people have found this project useful. Thanks. That means a lot.

JewelryBox is not abandoned. It was shelved for a while due to a combination of family growth, employment changes, health issues, burnout, https://twitter.com/sstephenson/status/558692081841881088, and the fact that I use rbenv more these days.

I've been working on it recently rewriting a lot of the internals to make it much more stable and pleasurable to work on. I've also been stripping out code hacks for supporting features all the way back to 10.6. This has allowed me freedom to redesign the view flows to make them more friendly.

There's no timeline for the release of the next version, but stay tuned.

[insha]

If it is abandoned anyone up for banding together to build a new GUI for OS X?

[kevindeleon]

@remear Good to hear. Wish I was an OSX dev...I'd definitely offer to help pitch in! Also...congrats on the family growth, and hope your health and burnout are improving!

[insha]

@remear my apologies, I posted my last comment before the feed updated with your reply.

[remear]

@kevindeleon Unfortunately that's what contributes to the burnout I've experienced. Many Ruby developers have mentioned to me they've found JewelryBox helpful and would love to contribute, but they don't know Objective-C and/or have no desire to learn. It's also unfortunate that often RVM changes formatting or flow and that breaks JewelryBox. I lack the time and resources to thoroughly test JewelryBox against each RVM release. I wish I had a Mac Mini or something with Xcode Server against which I could do continuous integration. Maybe Travis-CI can help out more in this regard. Back in the day it wasn't available. I realized recently JewelryBox is almost 5 years old.

[remear]

@insha I figured 😉

[Vinnie1991]

@remear is JewelryBox (Source) opensource? Because I can help if you want!

[remear]

@Vinnie1991 not yet.

[remear]

I wanted to give a quick update so everyone knows my earlier comments weren't empty statements. I've been working regularly on JewelryBox for the past several weeks. Major refactoring is going on. Code is becoming more manageable and efficient. Current builds have significantly noticeable speed improvements. There's still no timeline for a release, but I'm working hard to get everything stable again. It may take a while, but I think it'll be worth the wait.

Here are some screenshots of its current state. Keep in mind they're rough and still subject to change. If you have feedback, questions, or comments, let me know.

[mpepping]

Lookin' sharp!

[pboling]

"It's getting ready to look soooooOOOO good!" - Teen Girl Squad (paraphrase)

[paulhhowells]

@remear++

[pboling]

@remear Any chance you can get it in the App Store and charge a dollar or two? Many people will pay for it. If you want to keep your karma points, keep (make) the source open and let people compile it if they want to. Then you may be able to better justify, and be rewarded for, your efforts.

The auto updating, and enhanced longevity, of apps in the app store is worth paying for software.

[remear]

@pboling Unfortunately, no. About four or so years ago I submitted JewelryBox to the Mac App Store with the intention of using it a means to facilitate application updates. I thought about what you proposed but decided to keep JewelryBox free with the ability for donations for my efforts should users find it helpful. My intent was never to make money from Wayne's work. I wanted to give something back to the Ruby community. Sadly, Apple rejected JewelryBox.

2.1 and 6.1 were fixable. 2.15 was specifically an issue with the RVM installer and updater included in JewelryBox. Even after an appeal, the ruling stood. I'd have to yank out those parts or not use the Mac App Store. I decided that removing that functionality was more harmful to users of JewelryBox than the benefits the Mac App Store provided. It seemed absurd to force users to the shell for RVM setup and updates just to satisfy Apple's rules. But rules are rules.

[Yanchek99]

@remear Wondering what the progress was on the latest version of Jewlery box? It has been a few months since your last post.

[remear]

@Yanchek99 I'm sorry for the slow response. I guess your comment got lost in the shuffle and fallout I experienced during https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9200017. If anything ever happens like this again (hopefully not) feel free to ping me on Twitter until I respond.

JewelryBox is coming along. Most of the big refactoring has been completed. I'm cleaning up the more neglected areas of the code and interface and fixing some bugs i find here-and-there. I'd like to get a beta into people's hands very soon in the hopes they can help me iron out any bugs. This looks promising to happen in the next week or two.

[Yanchek99]

@remear No Worries, was just curious!

Glad to hear the project is moving forward and that a beta will be launching soon. If you need any beta recruits feel free to ping me.

[MrJoy]

One suggestion that could help make your life easier in the long run: Talk to Wayne about adding a parameter that changes the output format to be machine-friendly. This is a common thing for CLI tools to facilitate automation, and generally a key part of it is limiting the rate of change on the output format when the option is used, allowing the regular output format to change freely and often without breaking other tools.

[remear]

Indeed, that would be nice.

Unfortunately Wayne isn't directly involved with RVM anymore and hasn't authored a commit on it since late 2012. I often miss those days. Wayne was very open to suggestions. I recall the time where I was building out the JewelryBox installer view and longed for some kind of progress markers to facilitate showing step indicators in the UI. I described the feature to him and had them available in master within hours.

I've had several conversations with Michal about standardizing output. Michal's expectation is you should contribute tests if you want stability where you find it lacking. Unfortunately, like so much of the RVM user base, I'm not very experienced with shell code and lack the time to learn it just to write RVM tests. Lack of documentation around creating tests for RVM made my foray into this exponentially more difficult. See https://twitter.com/Remear/status/294144957592264704 for some historical context.

Michal stated RVM 2 would make testing contributions easier by nature of RVM 2 being written in Ruby. So I waited. Months went by, and now years. I attempted to hold off the JewelryBox refactoring to coincide with RVM 2, where I could also make the integrations with RVM less brittle. Alas, we're still waiting for RVM 2. Until then, JewelryBox continues to maintain its reactive stance to RVM changes in the hopes that one day there will exist the possibility of a cleaner and more-stable integration.

[MrJoy]

Hrm. That's unfortunate... :-/

[remear]

A small teaser. As always, feedback is welcome.

[pboling]

Looks really good! From a UX perspective I like the design elements, but I think it might make more sense to have the "welcome" first page have large info boxes that are more directly relevant to the Ruby install, perhaps number of Rubies installed, or a list, and number of gems installed in selected Ruby, and the boxes being hotlinks to "Manage Rubies" and "Manage Gemsets". These other boxes in your screen cap would be nice to have, but they seem secondary to the primary purpose of JeweleryBox, so perhaps they should be on a separate "info" tab? Just spitballin'.

[patrickwelker]

Great to see you still working on it.

[myob]

I really don't want to put a stick in the spokes, or derail your much-appreciated efforts. But... (there's always a 'but', right?) Have you looked at or thought about using RubyMotion? It compiles right down to machine code the same as Objective-C does and supports OS X as well as iOS (and Android, although that's still a young world for them). I've used it for iPhone apps and have seen some RubyMotion OS X apps that were indistinguishable from Xcode-based apps. And it's Ruby ;-)
Absolutely no reason to change streams now, but maybe after the current updates are released you might think about porting the code over...

[cyri113]

The website still seems offline, is there a reason for this?

[ruurd]

Meh. It's dead Jim.

[keilmillerjr]

Why wasn’t source code released on github? I have been using jewelry box for years. Randomly went to check and see if there was an update and the action failed. Then I find out the project is not only dead, but went ghost! Latest version I have is v1.5.1700