Re: gtkmm comments

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 08:01 -0700, John Taber wrote:
> Hi all,
> Murray suggested I pass these on to the list for ideas - note comments are 
> coming from the perspective of searching for the best GUI toolkit for 
> ourselves.  as info so far I have been comparing: Qt, Gtkmm, Fltk, Wxwidgets, 
> java, XFC, Fox, Ultimate++.  Maybe some day I'll actually get the paper 
> posted on the web somewhere.
> 
> I have been doing a pretty extensive comparison between the different 
> cross-platform toolkits - in short, gtkmm is very appealing due to basis on 
> gtk which is being strongly supported (although we really dislike the new file 
> chooser and cancel before okay buttons)  and I'm biased towards c++ over c.  
> Gtkmm might want to borrow some ideas from XFC in terms of documentation and 
> examples (I really found XFC to be excellent in this area).

The gtkmm book has examples and screenshots.

> Also gtkmm 
> is lacking in screenshot examples of applications using it (this is very 
> important when trying to "sell" the idea of using it to others - first 
> impresssions are so key).  ie Examples showing gtkmm able to use opengl, 2d 
> drawing, svg(for our unique needs), handling images, rich text / html 
> display, tables, etc

This is really a GTK+ thing, because gtkmm can do whatever GTK+ can do.
Clearly the GNOME Desktop contains GTK+-based software that does most of
these things, and I'm sure you can easily find GTK+-based stuff to do
opengl as well.

If it's important to you to have screenshots of these all together on
one page, then I suggest you go ahead.

>  - these are the key areas we have compared between 
> toolkits as must features.  Also the library dependencies seem scary more so 
> than some other toolkits

For linux at least, you should be using the distro's package management,
which should take care of all this.

>  - maybe it's not true - a sample makefile for linux 
> and windows might address this.   Gtkmm scored pretty well on developer input 
> (we look for more than 1-man projects)  and very well on frequency of updates 
> - we got the feeling of pretty stable, bug-free code (you never really know 
> until you're knee deep in it - that's why the examples of other apps are so 
> key).  Plus we use the Inkscape project as a great role model and they seem 
> pretty happy with gtkmm so far.  

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com