... checkout this presentation from OpenStep Day, 1995 in which Jobs applies the famous reality distortion field not to iPods and Macs, but to Corba, OLE, Web Objects, and other Enterprisey Middleware.

And the "One More Thing" moment? Using Netscape 1.0 to demo Web Objects and Windows NT 3.1 interoperability.

Shoes! It's cross-platform, it uses the same powerful vector graphics engine that Firefox uses (Cairo), and it uses a simplified Ruby interpreter.

Shoes is to the modern computer what BASIC was to the Apple //e and Commodore 64. That is, it aims to be a way for hobbyists and young computer geeks to do creative stuff with their computer.

That means a modified Ruby interpreter with really nice graphics, web, network, and text layout APIs that hopefully a hobbyist would be comfortable using. Knowing that, the Shoes About Page should make more sense.

Compare 80's style BASIC and modern Shoes:

10 GR
20 PRINT "PLEASE ENTER YOUR NAME:";
30 INPUT NAME$
40 PRINT "HELLO ";NAME$
50 COLOR=6
60 HLIN 5,10 AT 10
70 HLIN 5,10 AT 20
80 VLIN 10,20 AT 5
90 VLIN 10,20 AT 10

vs.

Shoes.app {
name = ask("Please enter your name:")
title "Hello " + name
stroke blue
fill red
rect 100, 100, 100, 100
}

Programming for a young computer geek won't be fun unless they can make they computer do really cool things. In the 80's, that meant color graphics and sound, along with plain text output and input. Plain old BASIC (or Python or Ruby) won't cut it today. You need something that supports GUI development, web and network access, pictures and video, and text layout. I think Shoes fits the bill nicely.

Do you mean my bugs, or other people's bugs?

Well, the answer's the same either way, but I want to be precise.