codahale.com٭blog

Coda Hale lives in Berkeley, CA, where he writes about Ruby on Rails, usability, web design and development, and the occasional bit about bicycles.

RubyInTray

RubyInTray allows you to run awesome RubyOnRails scripts, like Instiki, MouseHole, or Tracks, on your Windows computer without ugly command windows hogging valuable screen real estate, or without running third party applications as Windows services. It provides you with an icon in the notification tray which lets you start and stop the Ruby scripts as needed.

Screenshot of RubyInTray in action

Download v0.1 (2005-10-03)

Binaries: rubyintray-0.1-bin.zip (33KB)
Source: rubyintray-0.1-src.zip (26KB)

Notice where the zero is in the version number. This is really new stuff, and could easily delete your files, eat your cat, and lure your younger sister into an unhealthy relationship. This is pre-alpha, and there’s stuff I didn’t have time to implement–error checking, for example.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me: coda dot hale at gmail.com

How to Use

System Requirements

Setup

  1. Unzip the contents of the binary archive (rubyintray-0.1-bin.zip) into its own folder. You should probably put them in C:\Program Files\RubyInTray\, but it doesn’t really matter.
  2. Open RubyInTray.exe. You’ll notice a small orange icon appear in the notification tray.
  3. Right-click the icon, and click “Settings…”
  4. In the RubyInTray Settings dialog, enter the path of the Ruby interpreter (ruby.exe), the script’s name, location, storage path, and some other options. Click OK, and you’re almost there…
  5. Now right-click on the RubyInTray icon again, and click “Start <scriptname>” and RubyInTray will start the script in the background.

GPL License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

Building Your Own

The source is GPL’d, so feel free to chip in, add on, take off, or… you know, whatever. You’ll need Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, though, or SharpDevelop and a willingness to maintain your own project files and build configs. Please send me the changes if you add anything useful, and I’ll give you credit.