gtkmm comments

[John Taber <jtaber johntaber net>]

Hi all,
Murray suggested I pass these on to the list for ideas - note comments are 
coming from the perspective of searching for the best GUI toolkit for 
ourselves.  as info so far I have been comparing: Qt, Gtkmm, Fltk, Wxwidgets, 
java, XFC, Fox, Ultimate++.  Maybe some day I'll actually get the paper 
posted on the web somewhere.

I have been doing a pretty extensive comparison between the different 
cross-platform toolkits - in short, gtkmm is very appealing due to basis on 
gtk which is being strongly supported (although we really dislike the new file 
chooser and cancel before okay buttons)  and I'm biased towards c++ over c.  
Gtkmm might want to borrow some ideas from XFC in terms of documentation and 
examples (I really found XFC to be excellent in this area).  Also gtkmm 
is lacking in screenshot examples of applications using it (this is very 
important when trying to "sell" the idea of using it to others - first 
impresssions are so key).  ie Examples showing gtkmm able to use opengl, 2d 
drawing, svg(for our unique needs), handling images, rich text / html 
display, tables, etc - these are the key areas we have compared between 
toolkits as must features.  Also the library dependencies seem scary more so 
than some other toolkits - maybe it's not true - a sample makefile for linux 
and windows might address this.   Gtkmm scored pretty well on developer input 
(we look for more than 1-man projects)  and very well on frequency of updates 
- we got the feeling of pretty stable, bug-free code (you never really know 
until you're knee deep in it - that's why the examples of other apps are so 
key).  Plus we use the Inkscape project as a great role model and they seem 
pretty happy with gtkmm so far.  

John