Today I spent a good chunk of my day getting comfortable with [Limelight](http://limelight.8thlight.com/sparkle . Limelight is a graphical user interface developed by the craftsmen at 8th light that can give local apps a polished look and feel. It’s built in Ruby on top of Java so it’s compatible with most systems. My goal is to use Limelight as an interface for my tic tac toe game so today I went through the documentation, the source code and some example Limelight apps.

Limelight uses the metaphor of a production, scenes, players and props and then provides styles slightly similar to CSS that help make it all look good.

It’s late and I’m punching this out on my phone so I won’t go too in depth, but I recommend checking Limelight out. You’ll need JRuby so if you have rvm installed but don’t have JRuby just type the following into terminal

rvm install jruby-1.6.6

then

rvm use jruby-1.6.6

After that install the limelight gem

gem install limelight

And finally just type

limelight open

to access all the limelight docs and sample apps (in a limelight application, naturally).

One thing I definitely have noticed is that running the limelight docs app sucks down a lot of RAM on my little MacBook Air. Having only 4GB of RAM is typically enough but I noticed Jruby using over 500mb at points today. I’ll be interested to see what happens with my tic tac toe app.