This post is a reference to three things that combined to make a fun demo. There's a package in the Open Repository called PackageMetrics that some may be able to load and be amused by. There's also a little mov file at the end of this blog that shows it in action. There were basically three things that led to this:

1) For a long time now, I've wanted to have some way to encourage people to achieve more with less. For me, what really impresses me, is when you can make the same package do the same stuff (or even more), but have the code count go down. So I thought it would be fun to spike a little RB tool that gave some sort of metrics on a packages. This one does that. It'll show the class count, the method count, and the parse node count (derived at least). If the in image package has changed, and it can find the original package it was derived from, it will show a stock-ticker style "up or down" for the delta. The idea is you can look at it just before you publish and see how you're doing. You could do lots more, like graph backwards over multiple versions and such. This was just a fun spike.

2) While doing the Cairo presentation in Cairo itself was cool, it was just static graphics displayed on a screen. I was hoping to have a demo of some fun widget using Cairo in the browser. It was mostly done for the presentation, but I ran out of time, so I didn't show this. It doesn't need cairo at all, I just wanted it to be "pretty".

3) While I was listening to Boris Popov at Smalltalk Solutions give his Seaside presentation, I focused in on something trite in his slides. The slide titles had cool little "reflection" shadows of the title text, I wondered if I could do something like that using Cairo/Pango. Of course, mine needed to look cooler.

Enjoy: