Hi,
We did have a play with GTK, but it is a huge beast and its design made it difficult to integrate with it.
Which is not to say it can't be done, more really that we just lacked the necessary experience at the time. Remember, BlitzMax is also our first Linux (and Mac) project, and lots of time has gone into purely learning the platform.
The appeal of FLTK is simply that it is very lightweight and very easy to work with. It is also very 'pure' in a cross-platform sense as it does its own drawing. I agree that it's not the prettiest, but I believe its possible to override the drawing code so it should be possible to sex it up a bit. Although I doubt it'll ever end up with the native feel of GTK.
As for a common interface for *all* GUIs, I'm not convinced this is a good idea. To encapsulate all the stuff that GTK can do would take a massive interface which may be very hard to implement on other GUI systems.
I personally think it would be best to treat GTK as its own thing, and give it as GTK-like an interface as possible. Sure, once you'd gone GTK there'd be no going back, but you'd have one hell of a GUI module available to you so why would you want to?!?
We did have a play with GTK, but it is a huge beast and its design made it difficult to integrate with it.
Which is not to say it can't be done, more really that we just lacked the necessary experience at the time. Remember, BlitzMax is also our first Linux (and Mac) project, and lots of time has gone into purely learning the platform.
The appeal of FLTK is simply that it is very lightweight and very easy to work with. It is also very 'pure' in a cross-platform sense as it does its own drawing. I agree that it's not the prettiest, but I believe its possible to override the drawing code so it should be possible to sex it up a bit. Although I doubt it'll ever end up with the native feel of GTK.
As for a common interface for *all* GUIs, I'm not convinced this is a good idea. To encapsulate all the stuff that GTK can do would take a massive interface which may be very hard to implement on other GUI systems.
I personally think it would be best to treat GTK as its own thing, and give it as GTK-like an interface as possible. Sure, once you'd gone GTK there'd be no going back, but you'd have one hell of a GUI module available to you so why would you want to?!?