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.

Comments

Trolltech's QT

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.

Re:But what does it really mean in practice?

[pjrc]

I've build programs with wxWidgets 2.8. It does automatically handle those platform specific style issues!

I used wxMenuBar, populated with a heirarchy of wxMenu and wxMenuItem objects. I just pass a point to the main wxMenuBar object to SetMenuBar, which is from the top-level frame of the GUI.

On Mac OS-X, it automatically appear at the top of the screen. One Linux and Windows, it automatically appears on the top of my program's window.

Likewise for toolbars, I simply used with wxWidgets objects as documented, without any specific style stuff. They automatically adapt to fit the style of each system.

That's the magic of wxWidgets. That work you mentioned, adapting things to fit the stylistic expectation of each system, is exactly what wxWidgets does so very well. It's vastly superior to other toolkits which attempt draw their own widgets, because the wxWidgets developers have gone to tremendous effort to actually use the native widgets from each platform. You just use the rather generic API for wxWidgets and you end up with really good native GUIs on all 3 platforms. Best yet, when the user customizes fonts, colors and whatever else, your program adapts like other truly native applications. Other cross platform toolkits fall down in that respect to the customized style, because they aren't really using the platform's native GUI.