Back in the early nineties I worked on a couple of projects that used wxWidgets (it was still called wxWindows then) to target MS Windows and Motif on Unix. I'm amazed to learn that it is still around and being used.<p>I remember it as being quite a nice library with a decent API for its time. There are probably some useful lessons to be learned from its longevity.
With my consulting work, I still end up doing a lot of desktop application development. I've been on the lookout for a GUI toolkit that I could use to replace WinForms in my workflow. Ideally, it'd be cross-platform, support native widgets, and provide the de facto standard OO API that every other GUI toolkit has converged on. I know WinForms doesn't check all those boxes, but I see no point in moving to WPF which checks even fewer.<p>So I get excited when GUI toolkit projects get posted on HN. And then I'm usually deflated when I look at the screenshots. I know they haven't built these programs themselves, so it's not necessarily their fault that these developers have gone with the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink style of UI design. But they also chose to feature these particular projects, so someone there thinks these are good examples, which does not speak well towards their commitment to enabling good design.
<a href="https://www.wxwidgets.org/about/screenshots/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wxwidgets.org/about/screenshots/</a><p>Most of these examples feature something you should never do: selectively replacing the standard widgets from your operating system's toolkit. Either create/use a different toolkit entirely or use the defaults, don't mix and match.<p>It's disheartening to think that, in 2016, the least-bad way to design a UI is to wrap up a browser as a widget and sling HTML/CSS.
In the early 2000's I wrote a few apps with this toolkit and was quite happy with them. The native widgets looked/worked correctly and were "snappy." Around that time everyone decided that we would use QT from now on, even though it looked slightly off. I never had any complaints about wxWidgets/Python except for the passing of ID numbers. <i>shrug</i>
-> Better support for high DPI displays, especially under Windows<p>Really happy about this because it's becoming a serious issue if you support several variations of windows from XP to 10...