In previous posts over the last few months I’ve written about the efforts to get the ports of FOX and FXRuby working in MacPorts for OS X “Leopard.” Now that that issue is (mostly) settled, the next thing I wanted to do was work out the steps required to provide a binary gem of FXRuby for OS X that didn’t depend on MacPorts. I’m pleased to report that as of today, with the release of version 1.6.14 of FXRuby, that binary gem is now available.

If you’re running OS X and using the built-in version of Ruby that comes with that operating system, you can install FXRuby by typing:

$ sudo gem install fxruby

Once the installation is complete, you can verify that it’s working properly by firing up irb and trying to require the library:

$ irb
>> require 'rubygems'
=> false
>> require 'fox16'
=> true
>> Fox.fxrubyversion
"1.6.14"

Hopefully, this will make it a lot easier for Mac users to get up and running with FXRuby. If you run into problems installing or using the gem, please report them on the FXRuby mailing list.

Brian Wisti has just released fxtwitter, a client for Twitter that’s written in Ruby and uses FXRuby for the user interface.

A word to the wise.

There’s some anecdotal evidence that Google has recently modified the Spam filtering algorithm for Gmail. This afternoon, I checked the Spam folder for my primary e-mail account and discovered that over the past two days, six legitimate messages had been flagged as Spam. All but one of those were “bulk mail” messages, sent to mailing lists, but none of them were unsolicited. I’ve received similar messages (from the same senders) before without them getting flagged as Spam.

If you’re like me, you’ve come to rely so heavily on Gmail’s excellent Spam filtering that you just “set it and forget it”. For the time being, however, you might want to keep an eye on what’s ending up in your Spam folder—at least until the problem is corrected.