wxMax - Rough Guide
BlitzMax Forums/Brucey's Modules/wxMax - Rough Guide
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| What is wxMax? * It is mostly a BlitzMax GUI module. * It is a language-binding (wrapper) for wxWidgets. * It is cross-platform. (Win32 / OS X / Linux) * It is very large indeed. (you may read that as having lots of features, or simply by its code-size) But we already have a GUI module? Indeed, we have the quite capable MaxGUI, which is reasonably suitable for building small tools and utilities. However, for heavier application programming it becomes a tad unwieldy - most especially if you intend to use the same code across multiple platforms. It was never intended to work as hard as some people want from it. Enter wxMax. wxMax has all the GUI controls you might ever need - multi-column list boxes, bitmap-buttons, notebook (tabber) controls that handle their own page changing, modal windows, built-in localization, native printing - the list goes on... What's the current status of wxMax As of 10 Aug 2008, we reached v1.00 status! Yay! (Development started 20 Aug 2007) wxMax can be downloaded from the official website. What about games and wxMax? It has preliminary support for GL-based Max2D through a custom driver. It should simply be a case of setting the graphics context to the wxGLCanvas, and your Max2D commands will "just work". For Windows, it is possible to get the HWND for a window, which means that D3Max2D should also work, but this hasn't been thoroughly tested. As wxMax matures we'll be able to provide examples of these. Does it do anything non-GUI? Interestingly, the answer is yes. As well as various file-system functionality, it also has a good external process support through the wxProcess type. We are also adding to the standard wxWidgets toolbox by integrating wxMidi and wxPdfDocument too. Need a very high-level of PDF creation/editing? Then wxPdfDocument is extremely capable. Recently added is a serial/com interface called wxCTB. It allows you to use a standard API to access serial ports on all three platforms! We also have JSON integration via wxJSON! * Book Recommendation * The best book for learning wxWidgets is "Cross-Platform GUI Programming with wxWidgets", and because wxMax mirrors wxWidgets class-structure and naming conventions so closely, the book can be used to help you learn wxMax too! . The official home of wxMax is HERE. Keep up-to-date with the latest wxMax changes HERE. To help you get started you can use this guide. If you need any more information or help, don't be afraid to ask on the forum. :-) |
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