C++ GUI development is immature

I know there are plenty of C++ GUI libraries out there. Here is an incomplete but significant list:

1. wxWidgets
2. Qt
3. FLTK
4. gtkmm
5. FOX
6. TnFOX
7. Notus
8. Ultimate++
   
9. Toad
10. CxxGUI
    
11. Inti
12. VCF
    
13. MFC
14. WTL
15. Win32
16. Win32Gui
17. SmartWIN
18. WinForms
    

Whew! That's a fairly long list. But you know what? Although many of them are reasonably good none of them provide me with all of the features I want or need. Here's what I want:

1. Cross platform
2. Well documented
3. Modern (and well designed) interface
4. Easy to use
5. Widely used
6. GUI editor (RAD tool)
   
7. Free

None of the aforementioned GUI libraries can satisfy all my needs and that sucks rocks.

Raymond Chen & the visual history of spam and virii

Raymond Chen, one of the key developers at Microsoft (he's been around for aaaages), has one of the better geeky blogs on the net. If you have to develop on the Windows platform on a day to day basis you should check it out.

One of his recent posts dicusses spam - he's tracked every dodgey email and virus that has ended in his inbox and created a graph depicting when it arrived and how big it was.

The way such a mass of data is presented in such a digestable way would make Edward Tufte proud.

The result is fascinating, and there's good news; spam seems to be reducing...

The Rasterbator

If you're into printing really big images take a look at The Rasterbator.

You give it an image (up to a meg in size) and it spits back a pdf that contains your image spread over pages and pages using large dots to 'render' your image.

The finished product just looks way cool. :)

Wikalong issues

I've recently had a few problems with the Wikalong[1] extension for Firefox. It seems to have issues with a couple of other extensions, in particular DuplicateTab and UndoCloseTab. Instead of letting those extensions do their funky groove thing and create a duplicate tab, or regenerate a previously closed tab, the newly-created tabs are blank.

Not sure if the issue is with Wikalong or DuplicateTab or UndoCloseTab. But I found disabling Wikalong fixed the issues (and the tab extensions are more important to me at the moment!).


[1] Which is a terrific idea incidently! Kudos to the author.

GMail invites

Like many other bloggers out there, I'm offerring gmail invites to anyone. First in best dressed. If you're interested just email me your email address. I can be found at:

matt_dot_trentini@gmail.com

Just replace "_dot_" with ".". Dontcha just love spam? ;(