Another one to compare is wxWidgets: <http://www.wxwidgets.org/> wxWidgets is LGPL, but Qt is GPL. For FractInt, I don't think this matters. GPL is more restrictive, but Qt looks like a better supported and more refined framework. I'm going to do some experiments this weekend with both to see how I feel about using them. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

Rich wrote:

The license is GPL, which implies that FractInt would also be GPL.

I think either GPL or LGPL is OK.

This looks like a good GUI library that would give us cross-platform GUI support on Windows, X11, MacOS, etc.

I'm very interested in what you determine is best. Here's my understanding. I don't have firsat hand knowledge of any of this so I am happy to be corrected. I manage a team where I work that is using WxWindows. It is a higher level widget library than QT. If you stay within it's feature set, development is faster because it is higher level, and it's definitely portable very portable. If you chose Wxwindows you'd have a shot at directly compiling under both Linux and Windows. For strictly menu kinds of things one could stay within it's feature set. What I don't know is how efficient writing and displaying graphics images might be. You get wxwidgets implemented in an underlying window library - the choices are Windows API, GTK, Mac, or just X11. (Note that QT is not an option). Wxwidgets has the native look and feel for whatever platform it is on. Whichever one you pick, you have the option of calling the underlying API to get lower level functionality, but of course then you lose portability. Based on my limited knowledge, I would favor WxWidgets unless we run into limitations of the widget set, and even then we could still use WxWidgets with calls to the underlying API at the expense of portability. Advantages are portability, native look and feel, and more rapid development because of higher abstraction. Downside would be if you want greater control or features than the more abstract widgets. To me the portability would be a big plus. It sure would be nice to have a whole lot more code in common between windows and linux. Are you still maintaining the logical separation between the GUI and underlying functionality so that interested parties could experiment with different GUIs? As I said, I look forward to your conclusions. Tim