Today I was… sleepy ! Yesterday night, I realized that I had no sleeping pills.. without them it’s always an issue.. especially for the day after !
zzzzzzzzz
Since last week, I did some research about writing GUI applications. More specifically, I wanted to give a try to those publicly available libraries such as wxWidgets and FLTK. Those libraries have great support. They are all more or less multi-platform, they come with lots of sample code and documentation.. So I figured, now that I’ve got a bit more acquainted with C++, that I’d give a try again and see if they looked any nicer from last time I checked them.
wxWidgets code doesn’t compile straight away under VS.NET. I had to make some manual changes to some library names, then it worked. It’s all based on sub-classing, something that I don’t particularly like. Also, events are handled using a lot of defines (so much for C++ design 8). The nice thing is that the GUI on Windows, really does look like Windows.. and not worse, like for FLTK.
FLTK as a much cleaner programming interface, a window is an object and it’s created when it’s needed, without inheritance. Unfortunately, even the edit boxes seem to be somewhat custom. So, the Japanese input is lost (some patch does support it). Also the file requester is completely custom, and definitely not as nice as the standard MS Windows one.
So, I’m back to my application framework. It’s not multi-platform, there is comparatively very little work behind, but it’s my code and it’s much simpler to use.
All this started because I thought of creating a few windows to hook to the video-capture library, to get the output in other color-spaces, to begin some testing. Instead I decided to procrastinate and do this little excursion into the world of GUI frameworks.
In the end I’m not too disappointed to find out that I don’t need to jump into a new adventure with some new huge, cross-platform library.
Posted by Davide Pasca in Uncategorized