[LRUG] graphics with ruby?

[Justin Lawerance Mills]

Hi

I am a newbie and not backend skilled so be gentle.

I am not really a Ruby user yet more of a Ruby and Rails reader and  
watcher over quite awhile now ( before rails was really in ), I have  
been reading a few books on the area over time, and have played with  
instant rails, typo and rforum briefly but never really got going.   
At the moment I am half way through a really good book on Ruby..

Design Patterns In Ruby - Russ Olsen ( Addison Wesley )

I would recommend it to anyone interested in Ruby or in Design  
patterns and anyone with some code who wants to learn some ruby.

Anyway as a flash dev/design type, I am most interested in graphics  
related programming across platforms and possible use of ruby along  
side flash.

So I wondered what experiance and advice people in the group have had  
with:

1) Integrating Rails with adobe flash.
2) Cross platform ( mac atleast ) graphics animation interaction RIA  
ruby use, if any exists?
3) 3D graphics with ruby
4) IronRuby and silverlight (I learnt a lot of XAML while on a  
contract, but C sharp is not a language I am keen to learn, but  
IronRuby/IronPython on a mac seems interesting )
5) AIR and Ruby.

I know that unless I can do some cool graphics stuff on my mac (or  
poss my vista partition), and can get it setup easy I am not going to  
really get into Ruby, so advise welcome. At the moment I use textmate  
for any coding, but I am not sure how to get ruby to run direct from it.

Direction and advice welcome

Cheers


Justin