--- title: "A Tour of Hackety Hack" slug: "a-tour-of-hackety-hack" blurb: "Get a run-down of all the different features in Hackety!" categories: - hackety - beginner --- ## Welcome! ### Why hello there! Welcome to the Hackety Hack tour! You can access the different functions of Hackety through the buttons on the left side of the screen. ## Lessons ### A Lesson lesson. When you click on the Lesson button, it'll bring you to a list of all of the lessons that come with Hackety. For now, there's just a few. More Lessons will be added, and eventually, you'll be able to write and share your own Lessons with other Hackety Hackers. Lessons are just simple [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) files. Markdown looks just like writing normal text, but with some extra characters for text that's __bold__ or _italicized_, adding images, and stuff like that. ## Home ### Welcome Home This is the home screen, which shows you two very important things: your own programs, and the sample programs. Everyone starts off with one simple program: Hello, world! Check it out: alert "Hello, world!" This is an actual Ruby program! You'll learn more about Ruby itself in the Beginning Ruby Lesson. ### Samples If you click on the 'Samples' tab, you can see a bunch of sample programs that we've included for some inspiration. There's a few interesting animations, some games, and a few other things. That's all there really is to say about the homepage. Try opening the Editor. Here's its icon: ![Not this one, silly! the one on the left!](/assets/tab-new.png) ## Editor ### Using the Editor This is where the magic happens: all of your programs will be created in the editor. Give it a shot: try typing this program in. name = ask "What is your name?" alert "Hello, " + name + "." After doing so, you can try running the program by pressing the 'Run' button in the lower right corner. ### Saving and Uploading Programs To save your program, simply click the 'Save' button. It'll prompt you for a title, and then the program will appear on your Home screen. Once you've saved your program, two new buttons appear: 'Copy' and 'Upload.' Copy will duplicate your program, and then ask you for a new name. This is really useful if you'd like to modify one of the example programs. Upload will send a copy of your program to the Hackety Hack website, where you can show it off to other Hackety Hackers. :) More about this when we talk about Preferences. ## Help ### Getting Help The next tab is the Help tab. It looks like this: ![Not this one, silly! the one on the left!](/assets/tab-help.png) Click it, and it'll open up a new window. Browse around and come back, I'll be here. ### Okay, well... Shoes. That's a lot of help! Hackety Hack is built with Shoes, which is a toolkit for creating GUI programs in Ruby. All of the programs that you make in Hackety Hack are built with Shoes. That manual contains the entire Shoes reference, and there's a lot! Luckily, there's also a much shorter cheat sheet too... ## Cheat ### Short and sweet. Peek at the Cheat Sheet by clicking the icon like this: ![Not this one, silly! the one on the left!](/assets/tab-cheat.png) The Cheat Sheet is much simpler. It just contains some helpful bits that you should find useful. A quick reference of often used bits. And a short sheet deserves a short explanation. ## About ### About Hackety The classic About box. These have been around basically since the beginning of time. It's just a fun little image that tells you what version of Hackety Hack you're using. It'll change with every release. ![Not this one, silly! the one on the left!](/assets/tab-hand.png) Time for the last one... ## Preferences ### I do prefer... The Preferences icon is towards the bottom, and looks like this: ![Not this one, silly! the one on the left!](/assets/tab-properties.png) This lets you adjust your preferences for Hackety Hack. Right now, there's only one preference: linking Hackety with your account on [hackety-hack.com](http://hackety-hack.com). You __do__ have one of those, right? If you link your account, you can upload your programs to the website and easily share them with others! More interesting features will be developed along these lines, so sign up, stick your info in, and prepare for all kinds of awesome. ## Quit ### Self-explanatory If you did click the quit icon, well, you wouldn't be here anymore. And that'd be unfortunate. So, don't click it until you're good and ready. When it's your time to go, it'll be there waiting for you. ![Not this one, silly! the one on the left!](/assets/tab-quit.png) Come back soon! ## ... and beyond! ### What now? This concludes the Hackety Hack tour. Good job! Now you know everything that Hackety Hack can do. It's pretty simple! This isn't the only lesson that we have for you, though. Give the 'An Introduction to Programming' lesson a shot to actually start learning how to make programs of your own. What are you waiting for? Get going!