Best GUI API to learn?

[kasracer]

I want to start developing GUIs for my application. My problem is, I use WIndows, OSX, and Linux and would like to use a portable GUI API so I can make one program and freely compile it onto the other platforms.

My question is, what is the best one to use? Which one has the best documentation (a book would be preferable so I would always have a refernce)?

I know of wxWidgets but could never get it to work correctly with the examples even when I followed the directions and qt requires a developer to buy a license if they wish to sell a piece of software made with qt. Are there any alternatives to these or should I re-try one?

Thanks

[Andreas Masur]

Well....I also only looked at the two you mentioned. From what I can see, Qt has reached a fairly good level of robustness, reliability etc., however, does cost a lot for commercial use and thus, might not be an option for the spare-time programmer.

wxWidgets has been around for some time as well, and seems to be the first choice if Qt cannot be used. Other than that, I have heard or read about some other free GUI kits, however, they are basically far way from being useful at the moment (lacking of controls etc.).

So, I probably would retry wxWidgets in your case...

[cma]

On the WxWidget's wiki page, they do a comparison against several GUI libs: http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/wiki.pl?WxWidgets_Compared_To_Other_Toolkits

[Latem]

I'd say you have basically 2 choices too: Qt or wxWidgets.

Qt is free for non-commercial open source use for both Linux and Mac. But it sounds like you want to sell your app. If you can dish out the $$, Qt is definitly a better choice. Imho it is just a lot more featureful than wxWidgets, and it is really good to work with. Plus I hear that paying customers get pretty good support from Trolltech. But that may depend on the lisence purchased and stuff like that.

I've only had a little experience with wxWidgets, but it is pretty good too. There are some pretty good and advanced apps made with wxWidgets as well.

So it really comes down to your perticular situation, and what do you need out of the GUI toolkit. If its just a regular type of GUI, with not much specialization features required, I'd say give wxWidgets another try, and work at it a little more.

Lastly, I think GTK+ is supposed to be cross-platform as well, but I don't know anything about it so I can't comment on it. But it may be something worth looking into.

Latem

[kasracer]

I think I'll try it with Dev-C++

So far the starter project seems to compile so maybe it'll work out for me this time.

Thanks!

[Boardscape]

I was under the impression, only Java can really supply this transparency :blush:

[Andreas Masur]

I was under the impression, only Java can really supply this transparency :blush:
Well....these times have been over...however, you need to differentiate here a little bit...we are talking about the GUI part here only... :cool: