The sorry state of cross-platform GUI development in Ruby

Let's take a look at the contenders:

* fxRuby. Yeah, this one's a dinosaur. Pass.
* ruby-tk. Won't play nice with system libraries on Snow Leopard.
* wxRuby. Ditto.
* Shoes. Works, but does not play nice with already-installed gems, since it uses a separate system. It's own system will install but not run with Nokogiri.
* hotcocoa (via Macruby). Won't install Nokogiri because it references the C library libxml2, and Macruby does not like that yet.

So, what is one to do? Well, you could either give up on Nokogiri (fat chance), or say to hell with developing a GUI in Ruby and just go implement it either natively, or in Java if you need it to be portable. Then you can either re-parse the files, or use IPC to connect to a ruby daemon script.