Re: Looking for new customised GUI

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 10:33 +0100, Tim Edwards wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I work for a small British firm making post-production film special 
> effects software. We are looking into a new user inferface to add to our 
> software, which can be totally customised, and capable of running on 
> both Windows and Macintosh machines. Upon browsing the Internet, and 
> speaking to colleagues GTK+ has become very interesting to look into.
> 
> We would like to ask if GTK+ would be capable of producing a GUI for a 
> video effects application, something similar to Adobe After Effects.

GTK can certainly do this.

> Things of interest with us would include customised look which would 
> mirror on both platforms. Creating our own widgets for use with color 
> wheels, histograms and dialog boxes; vector drawing, flow charts and 
> interactive movie timeline, to name but a few.
> 
> Would GTK+ be capable of all this? Or if not would to be possible using 
> another means?

depending on your timeframe yes or no.

GTK is not available as a functioning native toolkit on OS X at this
time - your app would require X11.app to be installed. This has all
kinds of ramifications, most of them not good. There is ongoing work on
the native port of GTK to OS X, but it is not complete. The timeframe
looks to me like about 2-6 months until it is viable for a complex
application. I say this as the author of ardour (http://ardour.org/),
where we are waiting anxiously for this moment to arrive.

if you timeframe doesn't make that possible, i would probably recommend
Qt, which will make your app look "native" on both windows and OS X.
licensing issues exist for Qt, so you will have to decide how to proceed
there.

--p