I’ve taken the simple Ruby for Plazes code that I hacked together last week and used it to create a very basic GUI launcher:

The launcher is Mac OS X-specific in its current form, only because it makes a system call to launch the Safari browser; making it cross-platform should be trivial.

It’s the very most basic launcher: all it does is use the Plazes XML-RPC server to send your username, password and developer key to the Plazes.com server, which has the effect of “logging you in” to Plazes. Among the information that the XML-RPC call receives back is a URL that represents your current “Plaze” — the application simply takes this URL and feeds it to Safari.

The application doesn’t do any regular pinging of the Plazes.com server, download and display of buddy information etc., but it should be easy to extend it to do this.

To use the launcher, you’ll need:

• PlazesLauncherRuby-0.1.tar.gz, which includes my Ruby for Plazes code.
• A Plazes developer key.
• Ruby and Tk for Ruby (which, at least under Tiger, are all present by default; see here for earlier versions of OS X)