Good Looking UI for a stand alone application

[Luc Heinrich]

FYI: OS X ships with wxWidgets installed.

For the sole purpose of providing an easy way to run existing wxPerl and
wxPython code (and possibly "pure" wxWidgets code as well). As a
*porting* aid if you will, as hinted in the "Using Traditional UNIX
Graphical Environments" of the "Porting UNIX/Linux Applications to Mac
OS X" document, here:

<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Porting/Conceptual/PortingUnix
/index.html>

How many applications built into OS X are built using it?

I quote you: none, zero, zilch :>

Are you sure? How would you know?

What's that ? Homework ? Oh well, here you go:

import os
import subprocess

def findLinkedWithWX(folder):
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(folder):
for d in list(dirs):
if d.endswith('.app'):
dirs.remove(d)
exename, _ = os.path.splitext(d)
exe = '%s/%s/Contents/MacOS/%s' % (root, d, exename)
popen = subprocess.Popen(['otool', '-L', exe],
stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
libs = popen.communicate()[0]
if 'libwx' in libs:
print d

findLinkedWithWX('/Applications')
findLinkedWithWX('/Developer')

 

[Vincent Delporte]

There's a few more caveats I haven't addressed, and there are places
where wx isn't perfect.

BTW, do you know of a good article/book on writing cross-platform GUI
apps, with recommendations, pitfalls, etc. especially using wxWidgets?

 

[Chris Mellon]

BTW, do you know of a good article/book on writing cross-platform GUI
apps, with recommendations, pitfalls, etc. especially using wxWidgets?

There's a book on both wxWidgets itself, and on wxPython. Both of them
focus primarily on the wx api, rather than on the more general cross
platform problems.

The wxWidgets book is part of Bruce Perens' open source series, and
you can get the PDF from http://phptr.com/perens.

The wxPython book isn't freely available, but you can order it from
wxpython.org.

Unfortunately, neither book points out too much in the way of pitfalls
- they're mainly focussed on the API. The wxWidgets book does have a
section on some common errors with conforming to platform standards
and what wx can and cannot do to help.