>> Any suggestions as for which GUI library is the best one?  wxWindows?

Walter said:

>wxWindows is certainly a contender.

That is the way of the past!
Can we go with an OpenGL toolkit?
Is that even an hipoteses?

There are a few OpenGL wizards here.
What do you thing? Is that a good idea?

there are already a couple of open GL GUI toolkits
started. I would start from scrach but looking
of the good toolkits available.

The advantages are many and include:
- protability! - write once compile any where
- capabilities that current toolkits can't even dream of

the disadvantage are few and include:
- non native look :((((( unless something like java swing is used

I wouldn't mind colaborating on such a thing,
for old, retrograde toolkits I already have DUI.
(I might even start one after... and if nobody
takes up on the idea)

Ant

DUI - D graphical User Interface
http://dui.sourceforge.net

(I have my reasons not to post the links to the existing
OpenGL toolkits that I'm not disclosing, sorry.
It's not shameless promotion of DUI.
They should be easy to find anyway.)

"Ant" <Ant_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:bu6jhe$2s6g$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> >> Any suggestions as for which GUI library is the best one?  wxWindows?
>
> Walter said:
>
> >wxWindows is certainly a contender.
>
> That is the way of the past!
> Can we go with an OpenGL toolkit?
> Is that even an hipoteses?
>
> There are a few OpenGL wizards here.
> What do you thing? Is that a good idea?

Good and bad.

Pros:
  - Look cool and possibly very different.
  - Relatively easy to port (like mentioned)
  - Can be 3D
  - Fairly easy to make skinnable (for native and non-native looks.)

Cons:
  - Likely very system demanding and that means that it's a no no for
      older and/or portable systems.
  - Cool look might be alienating
  - Can be 3D

> I wouldn't mind colaborating on such a thing,
> for old, retrograde toolkits I already have DUI.
> (I might even start one after... and if nobody
> takes up on the idea)

I would love to at least discuss the possibilities and implications.

Lars Ivar Igesund

In article <bu6m86$30me$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Lars Ivar Igesund says...
>
>
>"Ant" <Ant_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:bu6jhe$2s6g$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>> >> Any suggestions as for which GUI library is the best one?  wxWindows?
>>
>> Walter said:
>>
>> >wxWindows is certainly a contender.
>>
>> That is the way of the past!
>> Can we go with an OpenGL toolkit?

>Pros:
>  - Look cool and possibly very different.
>  - Relatively easy to port (like mentioned)
>  - Can be 3D
>  - Fairly easy to make skinnable (for native and non-native looks.)
>
>Cons:
>  - Likely very system demanding and that means that it's a no no for
>      older and/or portable systems.

Realy! I though the bulck of the work
would be done by the hardware.

>  - Cool look might be alienating

I can be as dull as you want it to be. :)

>  - Can be 3D

Ins't that a pro? if properly used.
>
>
>I would love to at least discuss the possibilities and implications.
>
>Lars Ivar Igesund
>
>

Ant

"Lars Ivar Igesund" <larsivar@igesund.net> wrote in message news:bu6m86$30me$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>   - Fairly easy to make skinnable (for native and non-native looks.)

Of course, on Windows, there are currently no possibility to switch toolkit,
the OpenGL one would have to work on top of the Windows one.
This of course rules it out as a standard library GUI toolkit.

Lars Ivar Igesund

"Ant" <Ant_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:bu6mpd$31ii$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> Realy! I though the bulck of the work
> would be done by the hardware.

Yes, but older systems have very lacking 3D hardware and then the main CPU must do the work (which is very intensive).

> >  - Can be 3D
>
> Ins't that a pro? if properly used.

Well, I put it under pro too ;)

Lars Ivar Igesund

inline

In article <bu6mpd$31ii$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Ant says...
>
>In article <bu6m86$30me$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Lars Ivar Igesund says...
>>
>>
>>"Ant" <Ant_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:bu6jhe$2s6g$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>>> >> Any suggestions as for which GUI library is the best one?  wxWindows?
>>>
>>> Walter said:
>>>
>>> >wxWindows is certainly a contender.
>>>
>>> That is the way of the past!
>>> Can we go with an OpenGL toolkit?
>
>>Pros:
>>  - Look cool and possibly very different.
>>  - Relatively easy to port (like mentioned)
>>  - Can be 3D
>>  - Fairly easy to make skinnable (for native and non-native looks.)
>>
>>Cons:
>>  - Likely very system demanding and that means that it's a no no for
>>      older and/or portable systems.
>
>Realy! I though the bulck of the work
>would be done by the hardware.

If it's available.  Most new systems shipped today have some decent/minimal hardware accelerated graphics but this but this trend is only a couple of years old.  There are a lot of legacy systems out there that would have trouble supporting this.

>
>>  - Cool look might be alienating
>
>I can be as dull as you want it to be. :)
>
>>  - Can be 3D
>
>Ins't that a pro? if properly used.
>>
>>
>>I would love to at least discuss the possibilities and implications.
>>

It would be interesting to look at.  Isn't the GUI for MacOS X done with OpenGL?

"Lars Ivar Igesund" <larsivar@igesund.net> wrote in message news:bu6mtk$77$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> "Lars Ivar Igesund" <larsivar@igesund.net> wrote in message news:bu6m86$30me$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> >   - Fairly easy to make skinnable (for native and non-native looks.)
>
> Of course, on Windows, there are currently no possibility to switch
toolkit,
> the OpenGL one would have to work on top of the Windows one. This of course rules it out as a standard library GUI toolkit.

Duh. IMHO.

Lars Ivar Igesund

In article <bu6nm5$1fk$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Patrick Down says...
>
>
>inline
>
>>>>
>>>> >wxWindows is certainly a contender.
>>>>
>>>> That is the way of the past!
>>>> Can we go with an OpenGL toolkit?
>>
>>>Pros:
>>>  - Look cool and possibly very different.
>>>  - Relatively easy to port (like mentioned)
>>>  - Can be 3D
>>>  - Fairly easy to make skinnable (for native and non-native looks.)
>>>
>>>Cons:
>>>  - Likely very system demanding and that means that it's a no no for
>>>      older and/or portable systems.
>>
>>Realy! I though the bulck of the work
>>would be done by the hardware.
>
>If it's available.  Most new systems shipped today have some decent/minimal hardware accelerated graphics but this but this trend is only a couple of years old.  There are a lot of legacy systems out there that would have trouble supporting this.

Don't look back! Look forward!

>It would be interesting to look at.  Isn't the GUI for MacOS X done with OpenGL?

This is not a new idea.
The first time I remember was some years ago when I was
experiment with the fox toolkit.
( http://www.fox-toolkit.org )
One of the fox objectives is to be fast and the guy
said that he sould really skip all the layers and go
directly to OpenGL interface.

Ant

Ant wrote:
> That is the way of the past!
> Can we go with an OpenGL toolkit?
> Is that even an hipoteses?

I had already thought about something like that, but it is very problematic. In fact, ld0d (a well known finnish demoscene coder) dropped the idea when i mentioned GUI toolkits running upon libSDL.

First, i can see OpenGL melt the battery of a 3D-accelerated notebook in no-time - definately not something i would want in a real application. Besides, this other notebook would be too slow since it doesn't have an 3D accelerator. However, for an application which needs OpenGl anyway, this would be a viable option.

We all know GUI in Blender, which is completely implemented in OpenGL. Well, not competely anymore. While there have never been problems with 3D core of the application, they have constantly been in trouble with the GUI part, because drivers don't comply with specification. Sometimes Z-Buffer test doesn't get turned off. Sometimes the direct-to-framebuffer drawing doesn't work or works too slowly to be practical. Sometimes there are problems with the mouse pointer in corellation to the blitting mode... Finally, in the latest version, the framework was changed from GLUT (pure window manager for OpenGL) to libSDL, and some drawing has been postponed to it. Nontheless, the GUI of Blender takes a significant fraction of a second to redraw on my mininotebook, and it does it too often. So i would say that even for embedding OpenGL traditional toolkits, such as GTK, FLTK, and Windows, give a better performance and less problems.

With libSDL, a good GUI toolkit would be thinkable. But then, window has to be redrawn completely every time it gets dirty, you don't have acess to line accelerator, you cannot support graphic tablets, your window position control is too limited, and so on.

I would say that GTK GUI makes quite some sense. The bad thing on it is that GTK is a huge monster which is not installed on Windows by default, and only works well on Unix systems. ;) But maybe DUI-compatible libraries could be written to work with Windows GUI directly, and similar for other GUIs such as MacOS-X, BeOS/Zeta, AmigaOS and QNX, whatever is to come next...

-eye

Actually, why not get SWT from IBM and port it directly
to D? you don't even need the dynamic libraries that IBM
built for making it java accesible.  Has anybody thought
of this or event better worked on it?

Cheers.


"Ant" <Ant_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:bu6jhe$2s6g$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> >> Any suggestions as for which GUI library is the best one?  wxWindows?
>
> Walter said:
>
> >wxWindows is certainly a contender.
>
> That is the way of the past!
> Can we go with an OpenGL toolkit?
> Is that even an hipoteses?
>
> There are a few OpenGL wizards here.
> What do you thing? Is that a good idea?
>
> there are already a couple of open GL GUI toolkits
> started. I would start from scrach but looking
> of the good toolkits available.
>
> The advantages are many and include:
> - protability! - write once compile any where
> - capabilities that current toolkits can't even dream of
>
> the disadvantage are few and include:
> - non native look :((((( unless something like java swing is used
>
> I wouldn't mind colaborating on such a thing,
> for old, retrograde toolkits I already have DUI.
> (I might even start one after... and if nobody
> takes up on the idea)
>
> Ant
>
> DUI - D graphical User Interface
> http://dui.sourceforge.net
>
> (I have my reasons not to post the links to the existing
> OpenGL toolkits that I'm not disclosing, sorry.
> It's not shameless promotion of DUI.
> They should be easy to find anyway.)
>
>