Why FLTK?
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Why FLTK?
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| I have to ask, why did you go with FLTK for Linux? Why not dynamically link GTK (it's not that hard, you know)? Two questions that I think are safe to answer. |
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| Because it's small and static and was designed to run in full screen / double buffered GL environments on any platform. There will be GTK support coming but given it's alien method of gadget positioning and the current evolution of GTK2 (would prefer to wait for it to be stable and well documented) it didn't seem worth the hassle. |
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| You definitely have a good point about GTK(2)'s stability at the moment, definitely something that could have a large impact on sales if a large bug is found (whereupon you have to attempt to fix it yourself [and probably send the patch to the developers] or wait for a fix). Using GTK1 would just be a bad idea in my opinion, as it's old and clunky. Thanks for the response. |
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| FLTK is available on many platforms - so that we can use this also on win. |
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| I just had a quick look at http://www.fltk.org and see that one of those (^) is OS X (and thus, all three BMX platforms). There's also this, which sounds pretty good: FLTK 1.1.x offers two appearance schemes: "standard" and "plastic". FLTK 2.0 will extend this to include platform schemes as well as user-defined schemes. Colors and fonts automatically adjust to the current user preferences. I don't know which version the BlitzMax GUI will be using, but I like the sound of 2.0's user-defined schemes.... |
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| Because it's small and static and was designed to run in full screen / double buffered GL environments on any platform. Will we be able to use the BMax gadgets outside a GL environment? Should we be able to do the same things as we could with BPlus, pretty much? Specifically, will be be able to have a windowed OpenGL context alongside standard windows? This is just an aside. I was hoping that it would work this way, but your comment has given me doubt. |
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| As it stands the FLTK module is only utilized under Linux to provide a MaxGUI interface for the Linux desktop similar to the CocoaMaxGui and Win32MaxGui modules that use the Apple and Windows desktops respectively. FLTK could however be utilized on all platforms to provide gadgets in a more raw OpenGL oriented environment on all 3 platforms, although there won't be any real support at release as I have been way too busy getting all three Desktop solutions behaving correctly. |
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| Thanks for the info. I look forward to seeing the results of your hard work. :) |
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