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Old 14th April 2010, 11:56   #1528  |  Link
stax76
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Join Date: Jun 2002
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Quote:
is possible create GUI like mkvinfo/mmg for mkvextract natively and multiplataform?
Actually the current GUI is native on all platforms because wxWidgets wraps the native GUI toolkit, problem is slow startup and big file size, not sure why it loads slow but the file size is related to the OOP nature of the GUI libary, all methods in a class will end up in the binary even when never used. It would probably be possible to shrink the file size and speed up the loading but probably it's not worth the trouble otherwise Mosu would have done it already.

Best is to forget about the native term, there are so many different toolkits and development platforms, .NET for instance won't often wrap a native widget but rather draw one calling into the VisualStyles API so it's only partly native, other toolkits do the same.

Then you have the new GUI library WPF which has a very steep learning curve and is extremely powerful, it also imitates the native toolkit somehow and I don't think it uses the VisualStyles API doing it. WPF will be popular even though it has a very steep learning curve and is very resource hungry. It's already part of the Windows platform since Vista, the PowerShell script editor included in Win 7 is built with it, VisualStudio 2010 and most other new MS applications too. WPF's small brother for the Web is called Silverlight competing with Flash, most will use HTML5 instead which is technically inferior for application development but open which is crucial for the web.

You might as well use the term legacy instead of native speaking of the classical Win UI, most new UI stuff in Win 7 use already a newer and internal non public UI toolkit so only Microsoft can use it so C++ programmers are stuck with poor MFC, this toolkit is native meaning not managed so don't need much resources. It's much older than WPF, I think it was already used in XP, it's basically a native control hosting a UI toolkit, Spy++ report this as DirectUIHWND, not sure much is known about it, it's used a lot in Win 7, most parts of explorer are built with it.
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