O, happy day! One of the WxRuby devs (Alex Fenton) was kind enough to track down the memory leak. I understand that the fix should be released with the 0.40 verison in the next few days!

Prior to hearing word back from Alex, I had rewritten the entire UI in Ruby/Tk. I have to say, it was amazingly simple. IO went from knowing nothing about Ruby/Tk to having a complete Tk GUI in just a few hours. However, sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a a method to access the “Metal” look and feel. For me, this is a huge plus for using WxRuby. Being able to turn off the window controls significantly simplifies the usability of the application.

I’ll post the code for both version of “SimpleSkype” after the coming 1.0 release — and a rebranding. I don’t want to infringe on Skype’s trademark as this can be detrimental to one’s sanity.

I also just discovered Rubyscript2exe which promises to greatly simplify the deployment of my app to OS X! And here I thoughtthat I was going to have to write one from scratch. Man, I love the free software community!

I wrote the entire UI for my “Simple Skype” front end in wxRuby. wxRuby’s benefit comes from it’s use of widgets native to the window manager (i.e., Aqua on Mac OS X, etc.). And, while I only had a few problems with it, most of my problems were PEBKACs.

Sadly, the memory leak in my GUI, caused by the use of Bitmaps, was not among my PEBKACs. This is currently tracked as an open bug against Wx. It is unfortunate that this issue has apparently not received much attention since it was noted three years ago…

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