(C++) GUI Programming
 

(Yeah you heard me right, Justin Long. What's up now.)


I'm almost out of college, I've been programming for God only knows how many years, and I have no idea how to make a simple GUI. I'm referring specifically to C/C++ toolkits, by the way; I haven't used Visual Basic in a long time, and though I really don't mind re-learning that language to write a little program I'd rather find something that I can use in the future under Linux.

So can anyone point me in the right direction? Ideally, there would be some simple to use library out there that's cross-platform, but I either haven't heard of it, haven't given it a try, or have no idea where to get started. Here is what I know of, so far:

-Qt
I used libQGLViewer before, which worked fine for my purposes, but I've got no idea how to actually use Qt itself. The open source Windows version comes with Qt Designer, which lets you design a GUI with a good 'ol drag-and-drop interface and save it as a .ui file. Except, uh... I have no idea what to do with that. I tried Googling around for a simple tutorial, but nothing. I have a sinking feeling that the only way I'm going to find out on my own is looking through the documentation for a class that has a constructor that expects a .ui file....

-GLUI
I spent a few hours today trying to get this working. GUIs are ugly as hell, but I don't really mind as long as they work. In general, this would probably be the library I use, but for the application I'm trying to make at the moment, I don't want any GL functionality; I just want a simple form with a few drop down boxes, buttons, etc. You might be able to initialize a window that does that without having to handle an OpenGL window as well, but no idea how to do that.

-wxWidgets
This is what I'm going to try next. If it's as simple as it seems on the website, it could save me a lot of headache.

-GTK
I don't know much about this one besides the name. GIMP Toolkit? Never really liked the GIMP.




So does anyone have any experience with any of these? GUI programming in general? Portability, ease of use, yadda yadda? Comments are welcome.

It's more than that, though.

GTK+ is used by both GNOME and Xfce (moreso in GNOME than Xfce) for UIs.

So, if you're going to make an application for GNOME users (or have it blend into the GNOME environment,) you're going to have to use GTK+.

GTK+ is rather nice to work with, plus it compiles under both UNIX and Windows, which is a big plus. I've worked with FLTK before, and while its libraries are some of the easiest to extend and work with, they're pretty limited and they look like shit. I don't reccomend it.