The multi-platform C++ Fox toolkit 1.2 has being released. There’s also a “Whats New” article written by Lyle Johnson in addition to the announcement.
FOX 1.2 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This is great news
Here’s a site I stumbled on when looking for information about FOX when compared to other toolkits. Since I’ve never used FOX before, I found it very useful.
http://nic.nac.wdyn.de/~skypher/me/writings/fm-article-toolkits/art…
Interesting article, but I think the article is quite biased aggainst qt and it also misses the most important point: how much and work is needed to write an application with a specific toolkit/framework. And this is where Qt really stands out. It is very easy to write applications with Qt, Qt is the best documented toolkit of the named ones, Qt offers many utility classes that make working with Qt a charm. Also Qt Designer is a great application and KDevelop is a great IDE to develop for QT. None of the mentioned toolkits offers something compareable to Qt Designer and KDevelop (except of gtk which has Glade). In my opinion, this outweights all the disadvantages Qt might have (in my personal opinion, moc is no disadvantage at all…). Also when comparing the speed of the latest KDE3.2 with other environements, I’m not really convinced, that Qt is a huge bloated toolkit. I guess fox or fltk are faster, but gtk is at least on my computer definitely not. And one of the goals of Qt4 is to make the toolkit faster and the applications loading faster. Taking all these things into account, I think the increased productivity zou have with Qt/KDE outweights all the advantages you may have with other toolkits and the latest KDE really shows that you can write excellent and fast applications with Qt.
Can FOX apps use KDE themes? That would bring FOX into an interesting position.
No
That article is more of an opinion piece, that of a UNIX developer who’s experimented with various toolkits. Its helpful for those who’ve been programming with the various toolkits he lists on the page, to get a feel for the other toolkits.
Many developers have complained about moc, but that doesn’t mean that you (or I) have to agree with them. Just take it as their opinion and read the rest. I’ve used wxWidgets in the past and Qt currently and I’ve found that article to be alright.
Its not perfect, but at least it lets me see what someone who has at least tried out different toolkits thinks of FOX.
One big thing… for commercial purposes Qt is a VERY pricey toolkit. It costs $3740/yr for a single developer for 2 platforms, $4990/yr for 3 platforms. Comparatively Fox is LGPL, and should be seriously considered as a development platform.
Also, Fox doesn’t try to provide a complete total solution for everything. It does what it’s supposed to do, provide a cross platform interface to GUI environments.
I’d say the biggest Fox feature improvement in the list is the Unicode addition to FXString. The lack of internationalization was a big reason for some developers I know choosing against Fox.
Note that there’s still no full unicode support, as in drawing unicode strings on screen.
That comparison article didn’t mention the YAAF framework, which seems to also offer a solution to cross-platform GUI software development. YAAF is open source, and their web site is: http://www.yaaf.org/download.html
>> YAAF is open source
YAAF is not open source at all and its license is even more ‘viral’ than the GPL.
And where’s the screenshots section on the YAAF site?
This is viral?
YAAF is Copyright 1997-2004 by William Woody and others.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Neither the name of the copyright holder or other contributors may be used to promote products derived from this software without specific written prior permission.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
FOX vs Qt in the article:
He added the note “Dominant Microsoft Windows look” to Qt, but does not mention that the ONLY look FOX is the Windows Look. Qt otoh had styles. The Thinkeramik theme I’m using right now doesn’t look like any Windows Style I’ve seen yet.
Something that really catched my attention is the drawing speed and memory usage of FOX. It’s a pretty damn fast toolkit, with decent memory usage. The Windows look is a little annoying, but at least it’s not butt-ugly like motif
If only Jeroen would work on being able to use styles, so it integrates with the rest of my desktop…
RAD with it 🙂
Another C++ GUI toolkit that might be of interest is Toad:
http://www.mark13.org/toad/
I thought Fox 1.2 was going to have support for AA fonts through fontconfig and stuff? (I read it on one of its changelogs on freshmeat a few months ago) Is this a configuration option? I installed Fox 1.2 last night you see, and I still don’t have AA on its sample apps.
Yes, FOX has AA Fonts but its not enabled by default. Add this to the configure line: –with-xft=yes
Ok, I recompiled it with –with-xft=yes and I still don’t have AA fonts. What’s up with that? I tried Adie, PathFinder and Calculator, they all still use the ugly font.
ok… next step
goto ~/.foxrc/Desktop (create it if it doesn’t exist)
and add the following:
[SETTINGS]
normalfont=”Sans,90″
(the number is fontsize * 10.)
This should give you nice smooth fonts. Under Adie you probably need to select a different font in the preference panel for the editor itself
This certainly need to be automated during install.
Thanks, now it uses a better non-bold font.
However, I still don’t have AA and also, when I go to Adie’s Font panel it _can’t_ see any of my TTF fonts at all (e.g. I have Arial, Verdana, Bitstream Vera etc installed on the system working perfectly with both KDE/Gnome and even Mozilla/OOo can see them without a problem).
How do I enable TTF support and set it use the “Beatstream Vera Sans Roman” font?
BTW, the way I compiled For 1.2 was:
./configure –enable-release –with-xft=yes
Creating that Desktop file it forces the apps to use a non-bold font, however I still have no AA and Adie can’t see any TTF fonts, only the old X ones.
In the Font selection panel you need to select the “scalable” option to see all fonts (including TTF). If that helps in showing all the other fonts, check that they’re also AA. They should be (xmag is handy for that too
). Also check the configure log to see if xft was actually found. If you see AA fonts in the font selector, try replacing “Sans” with one of the ones listed in the font selector. If it still doesn’t help, email me 
.
Try replacing normalfont with:
normalfont=”Beatstream Vera Sans Roman,90″