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WxWidgets 3.0: First Major Release in Several Years
First time accepted submitter VZ writes "The first new stable wxWidgets release in years and the first new major release since 1998 has just been announced. wxWidgets 3.0 now includes official support for Cocoa-based 32 and 64 bit applications under OS X, GTK+ 3 under Unix and has thousands of other improvements."
Update: 11/12 01:00 GMT by U L : Clarification: it's been several years since the 2.8 release series, and fifteen years since wxWidgets 2.0.
1998+7 != 2013
What's 2013 minus 1998 again?
Yes, we can all look it up, but would it have killed the submitter or editors to mention in the summary, even with a sentence or two, what the heck WxWidgets actually is?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
2013 - 1998 = 15
Fifteen != Seven
Slashdot Editors != Editors
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Its great they are still alive, but how many people have moved over to other toolkits like QT the years?
Why would it be worth going back?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yes, this should have been explained in the summary. No, the editors did not catch it which sucks. Yes this is the first X. release since 1998 or 99 depending on your source.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
... that everyone's using and needs no introduction.
If I'm parsing this all correctly, this is great news because it means I can port my graphical C++ (or whatever language, with hooks to C++) applications from Linux to Windows or OSX (or from Windows to Linux or OSX, or from OSX to Linux or Windows, whatever the case may be) without having to worry about UI widgetry.
Of course, unless my applications are already written in a language WxWidgets likes, and don't make any calls to other platform-dependent things (DirectX, I'm looking at you), this sounds like it makes my job a little easier, but not a whole lot. Admittedly, I haven't tried porting graphical apps across platforms before, so for all I know, getting the UI widgetry right could very well be 90% of the work.
I'm guessing I'm still going to need my platform-specific compilers/SDKs/IDEs on each platform for this all to feed into, as well. On the Mac side (the last place I built a graphical app, and that was several large cats ago) I'm a little unsure how using this with C++ or whatever is going to save me time over using Xcode with ObjC.
I welcome responses or thoughts on the pros and cons of all this, either from the WxWidgets folks themselves, or from other devs.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I have wanted to love wxWidgets but I keep going back to QT. Now that QT is allowing you to port to Android and iOS I am not sure that I will ever take another crack at WX.
Other multi platform GUI'ish things that I like are OpenFrameworks (main complaint is that it runs hot) and cocos2d-x which allowed me to turf Objective-C on iOS.
There's nothing wrong with C++. However, I do my programing in C (without the ++), and would love have something like this available that I could link to my C programs.
GTK+ works fine in its way, but it moves way too fast for my taste. Function x is deprecated, use function y instead. Function y is deprecated, use function z along with function z(1) now. Ok, it's great that you're improving that thing, but not so great for a guy like me who wants to write an application today and use it for the next ten or twenty years without having to re-invent the wheel over and over again.
Since I have no particular desire to learn C++, I now do most of my programming using ncurses to handle the screen, keyboard and (occasionally) mouse. Ncurses is a Text-UI rather than a GUI, but just like the C language itself, it works very well,it hasn't changed in many years, and it suits me fine.
A slow-moving GUI like wxwidgets would be a wonderful thing to add to my toolbox, if it was a C library. *sigh*
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
This is my first ever submission to /. so maybe it's perfectly normal and I just have no idea how do these things work but I'm as puzzled as you because the original submission said "First Major Release in 15 years"...
Don't worry, you'll get used to it
I have had my submits turned into articles that I don't even recognized ... ahh... what can I say, the /, editors like to think that they are magicians
This phenomenom has getting accutely troublesome especially _after_ Commander Taco has left
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The whole concept of wx is silly. The additional layer basically means that it's awful buggy and breaks with new releases of whichever layer. And while it's to some extent technically correct to call wx "native", I have yet to encounter a wx application where the actual user experience could be called anything close to native.
Also for small values of 7. I took a fuzzy math course too. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
See, 7 is why we're fat. It's that whole two pi thing. We should be satisfied with one pi, but no, we have to have two. No wonder we're rounding up.
Mmm. Two (strawberry + key lime) pie.
Also, two (pizza) pie. Which is, strangely enough, the same as "pie pie."
Sufficiently large values of seven, indeed.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
wxWidgets gives its applications a truly native look and feel
That's it.
As a developer, if I'm into writting a custom application that will run basically on one platform, I will pick wx. It gives me the most integrated look, but I don't need to learn a new API, and the application could be easily adjusted to any other supported platform (you will probably have to slightly tweak the UI).
Qt on the other hand is great if you want an application that looks and feels consistently between platforms. That's why projects like Skype use it.
So wx is great for custom applications, and Qt for consumer software.
It's been many years since I've used wxWidgets (wxWindows it was called back then), but
a) You don't need all that. You only need it when you want to have an about box, and a close command, etc.
b) It's a bit boiler plate, since you do need to put that in your program time and time again, but it's very flexible, and it's not that much code if you consider it carefully. There is a function that sets up a window, one that attached menus to a window when you open it, and functions to act on menu selection.
c) If it's too much manual labor, then there are GUI editors to get you started, if I'm not mistaken.
I've always liked wx, and I will consider using it again when the need arises for a native app.
You can reduce this to
if you want, but this would just show you how to display "Hello, world" in a message box while the program at your link shows you a typical skeleton of a simple but realistic application. It doesn't try to be minimal, this is just not the point.