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The main reasons I won't be using GTK# though, are the fact that they still say they are unstable and there's no documented way to build apps graphically (SharpDevelop is Windows only, Eclipse is too slow) If you know how to do it in VS.NET or Whidbey, please get some links done.

And who can forget Azureus, the app that convinced me that cross-platform Java apps don't have to be slow and clunky.

Pydev has made good progess. Lately I find it to be quite usable for real dev. Few things beat eclipse when it comes to being an IDE, but eclipse is modular, it can be an IDE for whatever you like.

I second that..... been using Eclipse for my open source Java game and it's superb.

First time I've ever felt that I had a decent free software IDE as a developer.

``Java is slow, obeist, and heavy.''

And anybody who doesn't believe this might want to take a look at why kast wasn't written in Java. People have been telling me that I am the only one experiencing these issues, that I simply don't have enough experience, or that I should take a look at modern JVMs - well, here's one example of people who tried Java and were disappointed. The same happened to many LimeWire users. The list goes on.

Did you take a look at JWChat? It's a web based jabber client.
O.K. it's written by me, so I have to say that it is definately coool ;-)

The "Save as..." question is easy. Your drive was busy or is having a problem, you went into a directory with too much stuff in it, or a number of related things.

Or, in the case of my girlfriend's XP machine, it did it just because. :)

She got really upset a few days ago. Her printer disappeared. No real reason for it, it just stopped printing. It said it was there, it would self-test from the button, it just wouldn't do anything from the PC. She called me at work, so I told her to reboot. That usually fixed it before. This time, I had to uninstall and reinstall the drivers. WTF?

To add to the Pro-Linux spin of this site, I just did something *REALLY* cool. I downloaded clusterssh, and installed it on my Linux box. I have a bunch of servers to make the same change to, and a friend had sent me the link a few months ago. I just had windows open to 94 servers, and did the same change on every one of them simultaniously. I'd be afraid to have 94 (98 with a shell, cssh input box, browser, and email program) open on any Windows machine.

Plug warning: I'm the project admin

Go check out the Sydney project. There's an example at http://sydney.sourceforge.net/sydney_example.html.

Sydney is an all-Javascript/CSS/DOM project intended to create applications that run in your browser but look like desktop apps. It's already in use in a real project, but I'm not sure how much I can say about it, what with it being proprietary and all.... Anyway, Sydney is (to be) released under the LGPL. (The "to be" part is 'cause I'm just finishing up exams, and I haven't figured out the file release tools on SourceForge yet. Everything's in CVS, though.) It provides a fairly rich class hierarchy of widgets, including normal stuff like buttons, labels, and checkboxes, plus some more complex stuff like trees and tables. It runs in both Mozilla and IE, and it's intended to be cross-browser, so now that it's open source, it may start to work in $YOUR_FAVOURITE_NON_TTY_BROWSER. Let me know what you think.

Ian

Plug warning: I'm the project admin

Go check out the Sydney project. There's an example at http://sydney.sourceforge.net/sydney_example.html.

Sydney is an all-Javascript/CSS/DOM project intended to create applications that run in your browser but look like desktop apps. It's already in use in a real project, but I'm not sure how much I can say about it, what with it being proprietary and all.... Anyway, Sydney is (to be) released under the LGPL. (The "to be" part is 'cause I'm just finishing up exams, and I haven't figured out the file release tools on SourceForge yet. Everything's in CVS, though.) It provides a fairly rich class hierarchy of widgets, including normal stuff like buttons, labels, and checkboxes, plus some more complex stuff like trees and tables. It runs in both Mozilla and IE, and it's intended to be cross-browser, so now that it's open source, it may start to work in $YOUR_FAVOURITE_NON_TTY_BROWSER. Let me know what you think.

Ian

I've been using wxWidgets for some corperate develpment and I don't think I can be more happy with it. Integrating Cocoa into Mono is nice with GTK and all (didn't read article- sorry,) but is it going to use native UI faculties that the operating system provides? wxWidgets even has .NET interpolabilito under development called wx.NET and you can use that with Mono too.

I have this distinct feeling that supporting Windows.Forms out of the box would have affected Miguel's stated reasons for Mono ie Gtk# and using it for Gnome apps..... That's why probably Mono didn't implement Windows.Forms for Mono 1.0 (talk about MAJOR feature missing). But this is totally off that map ?.

If Apple does run .NET finally , it'll probably be licensed off Microsoft to prevent Microsoft from screwing them later. I have a feeling Miguel and Ximian-Novell is just doing "Free" development for Apple if they release this under LGPL. I care more about running my winforms apps on Linux and BSD , not about how "cool" embedding a browser control in C# is.

I have this distinct feeling that supporting Windows.Forms out of the box would have affected Miguel's stated reasons for Mono ie Gtk# and using it for Gnome apps..... That's why probably Mono didn't implement Windows.Forms for Mono 1.0 (talk about MAJOR feature missing). But this is totally off that map ?.

If Apple does run .NET finally , it'll probably be licensed off Microsoft to prevent Microsoft from screwing them later. I have a feeling Miguel and Ximian-Novell is just doing "Free" development for Apple if they release this under LGPL. I care more about running my winforms apps on Linux and BSD , not about how "cool" embedding a browser control in C# is.

It knows where to find all manner of legitimately free stuff, and some if that free stuff is excellent.

You rate tracks (including kiboshing them completely), and it selects new ones based on what people like you liked, plus a small seeding of totally random stuff (not all of which is G or PGR or anything like it, be warned). It works pretty well, I have a growing collection of totally non-mainstream stuff that I like. The only thing you need to give up is the herd mentality you picked up as a teenager, where you have to be different, but different in fundamentally the same way all yer mates.

1) WSFU is faster (IO/API/...)
2) WSFU is better integrated with win32 architecture (OLE/ODBC/...)
3) WSFU make a lot of things easier than cygwin with windows

BUT, i wouldnt trade cygwin for it, note that i have both installed here. I just isolated what i needed from WSFU and was better than cygwin and added them last in my path. I dont have any preferences, but cygwin is waaay more complete, and you have the +/- the same versions of the application that runs on linux. Same config files work fine, same behaviours (which isnt the case with WSFU), etc.

For me, WSFU is just a little + to cygwin.

Now bout your particular problem (prod env, 24x7), I've experienced very few problems running CygWin in such an environment. I use it since at least 5 years (I remember downloading it at 56k, so it's probably more), but there's some things you need to be aware with cygwin:

• Versions of the applications you run: they often differs from what you're used to. Sometimes I ended up with different settings between solaris, linux, win32, etc. This is generally fixed with a recompile of the common denominator version, possibly the latest one.
• Performances: As you probably noticed from the other posts, cygwin is an emulation layer. It is slow. And I really mean slow. Something you usually do in nunux in a few seconds might take a few minutes on win32 depending on how it is coded. Forks and threads are really badly implemented. Yet nobody else did better.
• Alternatives: Frequently natives win32 programs are faster, better, or both. Have a look on google after alternatives (adding +win32 +unix, and +free if money is a problem). It will save you some time. Maintaining several branches of your scripts might be a good investment, if you factor out the common base, and manage to get them do what they should on different platforms while compiling/installing (and anyway if you start nunux/win32, you might as well just do that, you'll end up with the pot). Though it perhaps require another employee, it's worth it. For cygwin alternatives I'd recommend the SFU (of course), Mingw, GNU utilities for Win32
• The DLL Nightmare (Take II): If you dont need too much apps (.exe) relative to cygwin it could be good to just use those. Compile the stuff you want in cygwin, and modify the $INSTALL path, so you can just take that to another machine. The DLL hell here is that you'll probably not only need the cygwin dll but some more... If you have quickview installed on your machine, you can see what DLLs a program use in its Import Section (from the PE header). Else i would recommend OllyDBG (free) or PE Explorer ($$$). Both can lists what DLLs an app use, just find them, and copy them in the folder, et voila! you can use it elsewhere.
• Perl: DO NOT USE the cygwin version of perl, unless you have a really good reason to do so. Instead use Active Perl It's damn faster. If it's called from bash then put #!/c:/perl/bin/perl5 -- or where ever you installed it). Some other things to know about active state perl on win32:
  • Hiding the cmd.exe box when running a script: Instead of putting '.pl' at the end of your scripts, try '.wsf' and have a look at the examples given by ActiveState:
    <Job ID="MyJobID">
    <script language=PerlScript>
    # ... your code here ...
    </script

giftcurs and Apollon are both quite good, both based on the gift daemon which has plugins for gnutella/openft/fasttrack/soulseek

http://www.nongnu.org/giftcurs/
http://apollon.sourceforge.net/files.html/

I work on the Audacity sound editor, a free software project that is being re-branded and sold on eBay under names like LuxuriousitySound. Most of the sellers try to conceal the app's identity, and of course they don't mention that it's free and open-source. The same vendors are also selling rebranded versions of Open Office and GIMP. We get a lot of messages from angry users who find out that they payed $15 for software that's free for everybody.

The vendors are obeying the GPL, so they aren't guilty of copyright infringement. They're careful not to use the software's real name, so of course they aren't guilty of misusing our trademarks. They might be in violation of deceptive advertising laws, or eBay's own "Brand Name Misuse Policy," but eBay hasn't yet acted on any of the buyers' complaints.

eMule plus. Unless you listen to that pop/rap/hiphop shit.

Yes, there is even a whole (Mini-)Desktop available online, also it's rather a tech demo. Only works with Mozilla/FF (Gecko based browsers in general), the desktop can be found here

Not only can you play it on their site, you can download the source code for both the server *and* the bots. Incidentally, the bots actually have decent AI--after all, the project was originally meant as AI research.

• UNXUtils http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ and
• ActivePerl http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/.

Settlers is a great game, but I see a lot being left out in an online verions. Player interaction is the key element that makes it fun.

Wood for sheep? Any one give me wood for sheep?

CybOrg, the Cybercafe Organizer and it's Spanish/English to boot!!! what more can you ask for???

Oh, boy. I get FREQUENT very slow operations of all sorts. Go into the todo list and delete some individual shows. Painful. Just hitting record can be a very slow operation taking over 30 seconds before it's all set.

Maybe DirecTV is doing something weird with its TiVos...additional background processes or something else like that. Mine's a standalone (a Philips HDR112, upgraded with a bigger HD, more memory, and a network interface) and it doesn't behave like that. Some have suggested the number of active channels might have something to do with it, but I have mine set up to use digital cable (with a number of channels comparable to what you'd get with DirecTV) and it's not perceptibly slower than when I just had the coax from the wall jack going straight into the tuner.

As for memory, I went ahead and upgraded mine from 16 MB to 32 (had to solder two chips to the motherboard and bring up the diagnostic menu on the serial port). For normal use, it wouldn't have made a difference. It mainly reduced the thrashing a little bit when tyindex (part of TyStudio) is active.

Urqhart is right.
There is a classic example of what Bethestha might face.
Ultima 7 and its followers. In the early nineties Origin released the Ultima7s (now can be played via exult
Well in its original state the game was almost unplayable due to heavy machine requirements and bugs. Over time Origin fixed the bugs, and the game began to shine. After a few years people remembered the game better than it really was (not that it was bad it was a classic indeed) from that point on and from the point origin released the Underworlds which also connected to U7, Origin was destined to fail. First they released Ultima 8 which was quite good, but it was not another Ultima 7. They got a heavy beating, then year after year another delay. Ultima 7 became more and more nostalgic, and Origin/EA simply had to face a giant which they could not beat. Then U9 came out, buggy rushed, it got a deserved beating, although the game concepts itself were amazing and later games showed that the design can really work (The two Gothics come to my mind), Origin ran into the problem, a) that they again released a buggy game
b) that the fans expectations were so high that they never could have fullfilled it with the hardware back then or a totally different design.

The funny thing is Garriot basically was right with his design decisions, it was just the hardware and the bugs which crippled the game, together with a fan community which had over the top expectations.

I wish Bethesta good luck but if they are unlucky, they run into another U7 fiasco.

Yeah, floppies are absolutely useless for things like BIOS updates, Symantec Ghost, and Darik's Boot and Nuke

I would recommend another LFS thinclient solution: ByzantineOS .

This thing is really smarter than a "thin client" for a library situation on a budget. Basically it just loads up Mozilla and nothing else, but the secret is in how it does it.

Byzantine OS loads virtual drives of all its data into memory (a small footprint nonetheless) and then boots out of the memory space. The only time it accesses the media is to load the virtual drive, after that you can eject the boot disc. Why is this so smart? It completely removes the biggest bottleneck in a traditional thin-client network: the server. You don't need a $50,000 server to run all of the applications nor do you have the latency involved with X over a network. All apps are running on the local machine in memory so it's blazing fast.

This could probably be easily adapted to boot from a network instead of CD media. That way a client will load up a fresh copy of the OS and there is no writing of information to any disk media. No floppy, no hard drive, no CD-ROM, no server side profiles. You just have one cheap server with a copy of the disk in memory that shoots it over to a machine over the network when it boots. The autonomous client then gets a DHCP IP and it's on the network.

You could literally have an entire thin client network with only one disc drive: a cdrom drive in the server. Or better, just a USB memory stick and no disc drives.

I don't know about you, but this is extremely appealing and protective of sensitive information. It also removes almost all moving parts from the entire network. If you get fanless clients and server (VIA EPIA or Transmeta), there is literally only ONE moving part: a CD-ROM. Alternatively, the server could boot from a USB key drive and there are NO moving parts.

So here's my short list of additions for the Byzantine OS that would need to be implemented for a completely diskless, thin client network:

1. Boot from keydrive
2. Network boot
3. A network boot server that loads off a keydrive and serves the image to clients

Stop wasting time and let everyone agree to use a formatter like Jalopy (for Java). You'll be surprised at the feeling of relief when you can just bang your code in, right-click and reformat.

There is a morphix derivative that is a pure kiosk style Firefox. Currently I am trying to remaster it a bit, not doing so well, but that is me and how little time I have put into it, and thae fact that I want it locked down hard. Oh - here look toward the bottom for the firefox iso.

Sera

imchk, check Gaim IMs from your WAP phone.

OpenKiosk

Quotes from the webpage:
"OpenKiosk is an open-source multi-platform kiosk system designed for use in libraries, ..."
"With this delivery, OpenKiosk 1.0 is finally drawing to its completion..."

If XUL is done right, it can be platform independent, too. I've seen plenty of non-Mozilla flavors of XUL, such as Luxor-XUL.

If someone can sit down and standardize XUL, we can start having "XUL browsers" fetching XUL thing-client rich applications over "XTTP" which communicate back to the servers via staeful connections through a conversational SOAP interface.

That would be (and can be!) "platform independent".

Just in case his site gets /.'ed, here is his impressive list of links. - Jonah Hex in non-karma whore mode.
Downloads
Linux Wipe Tools: Three shell scripts for securely wiping all data from the swap partition, wiping unused disk space on the root partition, or wiping an entire disk, by Thomas C. Greene.

No Messenger: A batch file that eliminates Windows Messenger and fixes the problem of Outlook Express loading slowly when Messenger is absent, by an anonymous friend of The Register.

FileCheck MD5: A free, simple, lightweight MD5 utility for Windows, courtesy of Brandon Staggs.

Errata: A text file containing my various blunders and ommissions in the book (right-click and "save as," or view as HTML). Last updated 6 June 2004.

Links to Other Goodies
Mozilla: A free, open source Web browser and e-mail client for Linux and Windows, feature rich and far more secure than Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Recommended for novices.

Firefox: A free, open source, stand-alone Web browser for Linux and Windows. Very light and fast. Recommended for intermediate users.

Thunderbird: A free, open source e-mail and news client for Linux and Windows. Recommended for intermediate users.

GnuPG: Gnu Privacy Guard; a free, open source replacement for PGP, for Windows and Linux.

WinPT: Windows Privacy Tools; a free, open source GUI frontend to GnuPG for Windows.

Anonymizer: Various services for anonymous Web surfing, e-mail, chat, etc.

OpenSSH: A free, open source SSH (Secure Shell) client and server for Windows and Linux.

PuTTY: A free, open source GUI frontend to OpenSSH for Windows.

Ethereal: A free, open source network traffic analyzer for Windows and Linux. Windows users will need to install WinPcap before installing Ethereal.

Ad-Aware: A free, closed source adware/spyware scanner for Windows.

SpyBot Search & Destroy: A free, closed source adware/spyware scanner for Windows.

Sam Spade: CGI gateways to numerous online tools, such as whois, traceroute, etc.

SourceForge: A vast repository of open-source software for Windows and Linux. The site can be overwhelming, but it has a search engine to help users locate packages.

GNU Project: The home base of the open source movement. A repository of open source products, chiefly for UNIX-compatible systems.

Security Information
About Internet/Network Security: An informative and useful site dealing with computer and Internet security, with reviews of security products and books, practical howtos and tips, and links to numerous tools and information resources, geared toward beginners and intermediate users.

SANS Institute: An educational and research organization with a vast archive of security research documents, news, and advisories, geared toward intermediate and advanced users.

CERT/CC: Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Cente

Just in case his site gets /.'ed, here is his impressive list of links. - Jonah Hex in non-karma whore mode.
Downloads
Linux Wipe Tools: Three shell scripts for securely wiping all data from the swap partition, wiping unused disk space on the root partition, or wiping an entire disk, by Thomas C. Greene.

No Messenger: A batch file that eliminates Windows Messenger and fixes the problem of Outlook Express loading slowly when Messenger is absent, by an anonymous friend of The Register.

FileCheck MD5: A free, simple, lightweight MD5 utility for Windows, courtesy of Brandon Staggs.

Errata: A text file containing my various blunders and ommissions in the book (right-click and "save as," or view as HTML). Last updated 6 June 2004.

Links to Other Goodies
Mozilla: A free, open source Web browser and e-mail client for Linux and Windows, feature rich and far more secure than Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Recommended for novices.

Firefox: A free, open source, stand-alone Web browser for Linux and Windows. Very light and fast. Recommended for intermediate users.

Thunderbird: A free, open source e-mail and news client for Linux and Windows. Recommended for intermediate users.

GnuPG: Gnu Privacy Guard; a free, open source replacement for PGP, for Windows and Linux.

WinPT: Windows Privacy Tools; a free, open source GUI frontend to GnuPG for Windows.

Anonymizer: Various services for anonymous Web surfing, e-mail, chat, etc.

OpenSSH: A free, open source SSH (Secure Shell) client and server for Windows and Linux.

PuTTY: A free, open source GUI frontend to OpenSSH for Windows.

Ethereal: A free, open source network traffic analyzer for Windows and Linux. Windows users will need to install WinPcap before installing Ethereal.

Ad-Aware: A free, closed source adware/spyware scanner for Windows.

SpyBot Search & Destroy: A free, closed source adware/spyware scanner for Windows.

Sam Spade: CGI gateways to numerous online tools, such as whois, traceroute, etc.

SourceForge: A vast repository of open-source software for Windows and Linux. The site can be overwhelming, but it has a search engine to help users locate packages.

GNU Project: The home base of the open source movement. A repository of open source products, chiefly for UNIX-compatible systems.

Security Information
About Internet/Network Security: An informative and useful site dealing with computer and Internet security, with reviews of security products and books, practical howtos and tips, and links to numerous tools and information resources, geared toward beginners and intermediate users.

SANS Institute: An educational and research organization with a vast archive of security research documents, news, and advisories, geared toward intermediate and advanced users.

CERT/CC: Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Cente

And I love it for gaming, though I would think that typing on the think would be hard, unless you could get some lighter springs in it. And for all of those "calling for linux drivers" Yeesh Can't say as I have tried them but I am one of those sad sacks that still uses his windows box for gaming.

Sera

:P you asked for it.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nostromodriver/

I have the older model, and like it alot.

Authors who find it difficult to stick to the conventions defined could use a simple tool to convert the code appropriately before submitting it to the repository.

This is the approach taken by jgrapht.

From the DENG web site :
"DENG is an open source Modular XML Browser, capable of rendering subsets of XForms, SVG, XHTML, XFrames, arbitrary XML(...) Currently, the footprint of the DENG Modular XML Browser is 76 KByte, allowing zero-install deployment of these W3C standards to the vast majority of today's web browsers that have the Macromedia Flash Player 6 installed."

http://claus.packts.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dengmx

This is a really cute application and for those of you who'd like to see Xforms in action, there's a few working examples on their demo page : http://claus.packts.net/deng/examples

Of course, it's open source (GPL).

I don't believe the claim that the software they use can, in general, "see and hear." Software agents can "see" and "hear" only in a very specific sense. For example, using Motion, you can capture only the frames that are "interesting," i.e., with some things moving. Some existing vision technology allow the recognition of large areas of exposure (visible light or infra red), like that caused by an explosion. It may be able to count cars and see if they're moving. I know of a project at my school to recognize faces in partial images (taken by uncalibrated cameras) in a conference room and see how many distinguished individuals are actually present.

As for sound, I accept that there are speech recognition software for many languages available nowadays, but none of them are good enough because: (1) You have to speak in a certain way for good recognition (no biting tongue, clear prenounciation, clear word break, standard accent), and (2) The ambient (on the streets) where the samples are taken is too noisy.

I think the way CNN runs this article is misleading of the current state of technology. It might be the case the their reporter doesn't understand the press release well, or that the reporter just wants to write something cool. Maybe they want to scare the public too. Shame on them.

Wrong, wrong (just), wrong!. (-:

Most of the useful Linux packages can be found (albeit sometimes a bit crippled) for MS-Windows (or nicely packaged for the Mac). What you don't usually get is smooth integration, full-throttle performance or regular updates. OTOH, very few attackers expect to find, for example, EXIM on MS-Windows, so attempts to priv-escalate to root don't work all that well. (-:

The advantages of Linux which my cutomers see (all of my customer sites are either Linux or planning to be Linux soon) are that I can quickly and cheaply set it up and then more or less forget it for a couple of years until a fan or hard disk fails (and yes, I do have and have had systems with years of continuous uptime on them); it's flexible enough to readily do a lot of stuff which is difficult-to-impossible (and usually clumsy) under MS-Windows; you don't need to worry about licensing; and it's never had a CodeRed or MSBlast equivalent. Different customers have additional different reasons for liking it, but that's all pretty much common ground. Cheap, reliable and flexible.

I don't see how the GP can price MS-Windows and and Linux systems at about the same on the same hardware, since the sites I share with MS-Windows all (bar one, who is ultra-careful about everything he does and visits the 40-seat site maybe every fortnight) have the MS techs constantly visiting to fix stuff up that should never break.

You mean like P2P-Radio
And yeah, it can stream video too...

This already had it's posting over the weekend, but... say you're chatting it up nicely at Starbucks or what-have-you on the wireless network. You're web-browsing while you're at it when - Wham! - someone injects a webpage into your browsing session with a redirect to an aim: URL with the buffer overflow. You've just been AirPwn'd

Supposedly trusted but hacked sites could also be used to inject malicious content. Case In Point: The most recent Bagel virus making the rounds used a binary file called 2.jpg as it's method of downloading itself to new victims. Even though it had the .jpg extension, it was an exe. Most of the hacked websites that it downloaded from were Polish or Russian, but one notable exception: http://financial.washingtonpost.com.

I'd say it's always safer to remove the vulnerability than to live in denial about having vulnerable vectors open. Hackers, like Love, will always find a way.

It's called "Render a stereo view and cross your eyes."

To be honest, I find it quite amazing. And (especially in digital photos, for some reason) the effect seems to be more pronounced than in real life. Maybe it's just me.

[shameless_plug] The stereo view is also the default of my little 3-D program on Sourceforge, Tronimation.
[/shameless_plug] I wonder how that would look in this new monitor... >:)

I did not see anyone mention Cricket at http://cricket.sourceforge.net/. Our ISP uses Cricket w/ RRDTool to monitor bandwidth on all of their infrastructure. We track our Internet usage this way. It appears to be a pretty good tool for mid to large networks. Just another good OSS tool.

To the best of my knowledge, Qt is the only other C++ framework out there that offers the range of runtime dynamic introspection that the VCF does. The VCF (and Qt as well) allows you to get all sorts of meta information about a particular C++ instance, such as the class name, class UUID, interfaces implemented by the instance, methods of the instance, properties, and events. Methods can be invoked dynamically at runtime, and properties can be queried or modified as well.

By allowing for all of this the VCF gives you the potential to build a full fledged set of components on top of this, just like Borland's Delphi or Java (or Cocoa for that matter), with support for ComponentEditors and PropertyEditors. Because all of this can be queried at runtime, you can build a really kickass GUI builder, again just like Delphi or Cocoa's InterfaceBuilder. Qt can also support this (though they do it a bit differently I believe, but it's pretty close). WxWidgets, FOX, GTK, et al, don't have the features built in to really support anything like this. QTK has a sort of OO like property system but it's extremely hacky and cumbersome to use (IMHO). Qt and the VCF, make this easier because of C++.

Whereas Qt requires a separate preprocessor step, the MOC tool, a developer using the VCF is able to supply this information all in regular C++ and through the usage of macros (icky, but hey, life's not perfect).

Here's some more info on the reflection API's in the VCF:
RTTI docs

To the best of my knowledge, Qt is the only other C++ framework out there that offers the range of runtime dynamic introspection that the VCF does. The VCF (and Qt as well) allows you to get all sorts of meta information about a particular C++ instance, such as the class name, class UUID, interfaces implemented by the instance, methods of the instance, properties, and events. Methods can be invoked dynamically at runtime, and properties can be queried or modified as well.

By allowing for all of this the VCF gives you the potential to build a full fledged set of components on top of this, just like Borland's Delphi or Java (or Cocoa for that matter), with support for ComponentEditors and PropertyEditors. Because all of this can be queried at runtime, you can build a really kickass GUI builder, again just like Delphi or Cocoa's InterfaceBuilder. Qt can also support this (though they do it a bit differently I believe, but it's pretty close). WxWidgets, FOX, GTK, et al, don't have the features built in to really support anything like this. QTK has a sort of OO like property system but it's extremely hacky and cumbersome to use (IMHO). Qt and the VCF, make this easier because of C++.

Whereas Qt requires a separate preprocessor step, the MOC tool, a developer using the VCF is able to supply this information all in regular C++ and through the usage of macros (icky, but hey, life's not perfect).

Here's some more info on the reflection API's in the VCF:
RTTI docs

To the best of my knowledge, Qt is the only other C++ framework out there that offers the range of runtime dynamic introspection that the VCF does. The VCF (and Qt as well) allows you to get all sorts of meta information about a particular C++ instance, such as the class name, class UUID, interfaces implemented by the instance, methods of the instance, properties, and events. Methods can be invoked dynamically at runtime, and properties can be queried or modified as well.

By allowing for all of this the VCF gives you the potential to build a full fledged set of components on top of this, just like Borland's Delphi or Java (or Cocoa for that matter), with support for ComponentEditors and PropertyEditors. Because all of this can be queried at runtime, you can build a really kickass GUI builder, again just like Delphi or Cocoa's InterfaceBuilder. Qt can also support this (though they do it a bit differently I believe, but it's pretty close). WxWidgets, FOX, GTK, et al, don't have the features built in to really support anything like this. QTK has a sort of OO like property system but it's extremely hacky and cumbersome to use (IMHO). Qt and the VCF, make this easier because of C++.

Whereas Qt requires a separate preprocessor step, the MOC tool, a developer using the VCF is able to supply this information all in regular C++ and through the usage of macros (icky, but hey, life's not perfect).

Here's some more info on the reflection API's in the VCF:
RTTI docs

Care to be a bit more specific *which* screenshots you have a problem with?
For example:
VCF Builder Screenshot
What about that looks like "crap"?

You mean like this:
Doxygen generated source code documentation.
You might consider spending 30 seconds perusing the website next time :)

It should not be too difficult to create an appropriate lufs fss module to do the trick.

Myself, I use Eclipse to do all my coding, and I find the Quantum DB plugin to Eclipse to be awesome. Because we use Oracle, mysql, and Postgres, it's handy to have one piece of software handle all the DBs (so long as you have the right JDBC driver.