...there was BlitzMax + MaxGUI.
Nice as MaxGUI is, it's not really designed for big applications, and is a bugger to get everything looking good across platforms - which is the whole point of a write-once-compile-for-three-platforms application.
...then came BlitzMax + wxWidgets, otherwise known as wxMax. wxMax is a BlitzMax language-binding of the wxWidgets API, written by someone who should probably know better!
As a cross-platform applicaiton framework, it is very good indeed. It covers more than simply the GUI, with tools such as PDF generation.
Qt, is very similar to wxWidgets, but for a couple of facts.
The first, is that it renders its own UI, rather than trying to use the native gadgets (which wxWidgets does). As long as it looks the same, then how things are rendered isn't too important.
The second, is that Qt already has Cocoa support (in Qt 4.5), and has cross-platform support for WebKit (the engine that Safari uses to render web pages).
Otherwise, the two are very similar in functionality.
So why Qt, if wxWidgets is already good enough?
Well, why not?
There's no harm in having more choice :-)
Now that Qt is LGPL, it's also easier to develop applications for it that are intended to run on all three platforms (Linux, Mac and Win32). Previously, Win32 was GPL or Commercial only.
Anyway, I'll hopefully be writing about my adventures here...
Stay tuned ;-)
Erhm ... which makes me scratch my head and wonder ... what is BlitzMax, exactly ?
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