The Site With the Lamp

June 14, 2004

I have a confession to make. I only know one way of making a GUI; that is using java swing. I no nothing at all about the win32 APIs and have never learnt GTK or QT either.

That does not mean I am not familiar with C or C++, I know both of them reasonably well - but that knowledge is limited to making console applications or servers. So what has wxWindows got to do with all this?

I was compiling audacity from source the other day when it complained about a missing wxWindows, as a result I had to download and compile wxWindows and well I found it rather impressive. According the docs it's a cross platform system but then again so it QT.

I did try to learn QT sometime ago but later on abandoned it. At my age (29+) writing a hello world program is not very rewarding I don't get a kick out of it until something substantial appears on the screen and using some designer to create a good looking UI is self defeating (at least during the learning stage) as a result my mastery of GUI creation on linux didn't come to pass.

May be I might get a second chance with wxWindows.