Really? No one has mentioned the most popular, polished, cross platform application that's also a complete development environment: Firefox.
Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
31–40 of 57 posts
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#32YelloSoft http://yellosoft.us/
I complain about the very same thing. There hasn't been a lot of development effort for building anything cross-platform. Out of fifty LISP implementations I looked at, only a few were cross-compatible. Hardly any computer games are multiplatform. I build my own software and release it on Mac, Linux, and Windows whenever possible. It's been really easy starting with a common code base (C/C++/Java/whatever) and creating the GUI using native tools: Xcode, Visual Studio, Glade. The GUIs end up looking good, are easy to make (if a little more trouble to sync between the OSs), and I don't have to spend hours scouring the 'Net for information on GUIs across several operating systems. It's becoming alarmingly common for Google to return no search results about some computing topics and programming errors. If I can't Google it, I can't fix it.
One of my biggest problems has been incomplete programming language support. Why should I learn wxWidgets if wxRuby is half-done? The documentation for RubyCocoa is even less substantial. I can't begin coding unless I understand a minimum of how the various GUI objects interact. I finally understand all those dumb underscores in RubyCocoa methods. Objective C is odd, but consistent.
Something like a Swing but C based would be nice, but it's a lot of trouble to wrap native methods (menubars, system trays, pop-ups, etc.) and not that rewarding. It's easier to extend a codebase using native tools for the interface.
Proof of concept: IOS7Crypt http://yellosoft.us/index.php?id=55
This app has a ridiculous amount of ports in assorted languages and toolkits. I've done it with Perl, Python, Java, Lua, Ruby, C, C++, and Objective C; on Tkinter, wxWidgets, Gtk, Qt, Glade, Cocoa, Windows forms, Swing, and HTML/Rails. Ultimately, I just use the command line interface and simple Mac/Windows/Linux GUIs. The screenshots are Cocoa, because it naturally looks the best!
newLISP version coming soon.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#33I am most curious about GNUstep (gnustep.org). GNUstep is similar to the Window Maker window manager on Linux, like Cocoa uses Aqua on Mac OS X. From what I've seen, GNUstep and Cocoa are very similar (both Objective-C, both using the original NS* classes, etc.) and the project aims to remain compatible with Cocoa where possible. I've used both Window Maker and Aqua, and I like both GUI styles. Apparently GNUstep is…
There's also The Cocotron, a Cocoa implementation for Win32 - http://www.cocotron.org/Info
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some amazing apps built with swing...JetBrains IDEA and jEdit being two.
Interesting to note that two "amazing" apps written with Java are to help Java programmers ...
To characterize both exclusively as tools to help java programmers shows that you haven't investigated either very much.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#35I'm quite surprised to see that nobody has mentioned fltk (http://fltk.org). It is light, easy to use, and it uses a modified gpl license that allows linking against non-free code. And it has native look and feel too...
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#36You forgot Swing+Java/Jython/JRuby/Groovy/Clojure.
How I wish I could forget Swing.
> How I wish I could forget Swing.
Could you explain why? Last time I used Java (years ago), Swing was supposedly replacing AWT. Swing seemed very large (certainly, judging by the page-count of all the Swing books on bookstore shelves), and required a lot of subclassing to use.
When I tried it out, it was slow, to be sure, but it was also relatively easy to use. The layout managers worked well for my simple apps. I also liked the "Metal" theme, though others complained that Metal was unreservedly ugly.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#37If coding in Java is an option, I would highly recommend SWT ( http://www.eclipse.org/swt/ ). It's the toolkit that was used to build Eclipse, and it has a very 'native' look & feel (click the link for examples). Plus, Java itself is cross-platform. Might be just what you're looking for.
Java GUI's always seem just a little bit unresponsive, an irritating latency with every small move you make. This is my biggest complaint with eclipse and every other java app I've ever used.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#38The current Tk (8.5 and above) looks a lot better, using native widgets where possible, and Starkit makes deployment of Tcl/Tk applications a breeze. Those who forget history are doomed to reimplement it.
I think that Tcl and Tk have a terrible "marketing operation" and haven't done a very good job of getting the word out about things like this - it's a huge improvement. This has some screenshots, which are a bit out of date, but show that things have improved: http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/
Looking at the Tile screenshots for Unix, I don't see any that are antialiased (like the rest of my desktop), though "Revitalized" doesn't look bad at all.
(Incidentally, Tile doesn't seem very active. It's last News page update is from 2006.)
I think you're right about the "marketing" for Tk. The three things that keep people away from Tk (IMO) are probably:
1. the notion that they'll have to install or use Tcl,
2. the extra work of having to install various plug-ins/theme-engines/whatever to get a more modern-looking GUI, and
3. the revulsion at seeing non-antialiased fonts in GUI widgets.
If someone were to come along and bundle up Tcl/Tk with Tile and make the whole thing dead-easy to install and start using, I think that would be a major step forward for Tk. (Hm. Looks like it may have been proposed to do that back in 2005: http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/248 . What ever happened to that?)
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that Tcl and Tk have a terrible "marketing operation" and haven't done a very good job of getting the word out about things like this - it's a huge improvement. This has some screenshots, which are a bit out of date, but show that things have improved: http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/
Looking at the Tile screenshots for Unix, I don't see any that are antialiased (like the rest of my desktop), though "Revitalized" doesn't look bad at all. (Incidentally, Tile doesn't seem very active. It's last News page update is from 2006.) I think you're right about the "marketing" for Tk. The three things that keep people away from Tk (IMO) are probably: 1. the notion that they'll have to install or use Tcl, 2.…
Wait. http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.tml . Most recent release was ... last month.
Looking at that list of Tk highlights, I'm getting the impression that various screenshots and wiki docs on the net are a tad out of date. It would seem that Tile has already been included. Tk 8.5 is looking quite good.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#40I've worked with Qt.
It's great -- C++ and cumbersome build procedure notwithstanding.
The API is also nice.
Further, it works on embedded platforms too (think cellphones).
There is a PyQt, but the last time I tried it, it wasn't as mature as I wanted it to be. Maybe you can give that a try.