WxWidgets 3.0: First Major Release in Several Years 147
First time accepted submitter VZ writes "The first new stable wxWidgets release in years and the first new major release since 1998 has just been announced. wxWidgets 3.0 now includes official support for Cocoa-based 32 and 64 bit applications under OS X, GTK+ 3 under Unix and has thousands of other improvements."
Update: 11/12 01:00 GMT by U L : Clarification: it's been several years since the 2.8 release series, and fifteen years since wxWidgets 2.0.
Re:Seven Years (Score:4, Interesting)
This is my first ever submission to /. so maybe it's perfectly normal and I just have no idea how do these things work but I'm as puzzled as you because the original submission said "First Major Release in 15 years"...
Re:Is it still relevant? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would say yes. Unlike QT it uses Native Widgets so it looks more like a native app than a QT or GTK app does. It was also pretty light weight as well. The fact that Audacidy uses it means that it is important enough. If you are a developer and are interested in multi platform it is really worth the time to explore.
Trolltech's QT (Score:5, Interesting)
Other multi platform GUI'ish things that I like are OpenFrameworks (main complaint is that it runs hot) and cocos2d-x which allowed me to turf Objective-C on iOS.
Too bad it's a C++ library... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's nothing wrong with C++. However, I do my programing in C (without the ++), and would love have something like this available that I could link to my C programs.
GTK+ works fine in its way, but it moves way too fast for my taste. Function x is deprecated, use function y instead. Function y is deprecated, use function z along with function z(1) now. Ok, it's great that you're improving that thing, but not so great for a guy like me who wants to write an application today and use it for the next ten or twenty years without having to re-invent the wheel over and over again.
Since I have no particular desire to learn C++, I now do most of my programming using ncurses to handle the screen, keyboard and (occasionally) mouse. Ncurses is a Text-UI rather than a GUI, but just like the C language itself, it works very well,it hasn't changed in many years, and it suits me fine.
A slow-moving GUI like wxwidgets would be a wonderful thing to add to my toolbox, if it was a C library. *sigh*
Re:But what does it really mean in practice? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've build programs with wxWidgets 2.8. It does automatically handle those platform specific style issues!
I used wxMenuBar, populated with a heirarchy of wxMenu and wxMenuItem objects. I just pass a point to the main wxMenuBar object to SetMenuBar, which is from the top-level frame of the GUI.
On Mac OS-X, it automatically appear at the top of the screen. One Linux and Windows, it automatically appears on the top of my program's window.
Likewise for toolbars, I simply used with wxWidgets objects as documented, without any specific style stuff. They automatically adapt to fit the style of each system.
That's the magic of wxWidgets. That work you mentioned, adapting things to fit the stylistic expectation of each system, is exactly what wxWidgets does so very well. It's vastly superior to other toolkits which attempt draw their own widgets, because the wxWidgets developers have gone to tremendous effort to actually use the native widgets from each platform. You just use the rather generic API for wxWidgets and you end up with really good native GUIs on all 3 platforms. Best yet, when the user customizes fonts, colors and whatever else, your program adapts like other truly native applications. Other cross platform toolkits fall down in that respect to the customized style, because they aren't really using the platform's native GUI.