What is the best way to make a simple cross platform GUI in C++? [closed]

Question

I want to produce a desktop application with a very simple GUI (a background graphic, a cancel button and a progress bar).

My main targets are Mac and Windows.

Is this possible using Visual C++ 2008?

Can anyone point to any examples using Visual C++?

Or is there a better way to create the GUI separately?

Answer 1

Use Qt4. http://qt-project.org/

This is a self containing framework which contains developers tools, GUI builders, String/IO/XML/Thread classes, Audio/Video controls, HTML widgets and many, many more features. It's built to be completely multi-platform, one code for all systems.

In contrary to wxWidgets, it feels more object-oriented, and has by far better documentation and its better maintained.

See it online: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/

EDIT- 6 years since the original Answer. I should point to Qt5 - http://www.qt.io/

Answer 2

I would recommend wxWidgets. It's crossplatform and works with Visual C++.

There's also Qt (see Colins post) which is what KDE (Linux desktop manager) uses. It has a more restrictive license though.

Answer 3

You can also have a look at FLTK

FLTK (pronounced "fulltick") is a cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit for UNIX®/Linux® (X11), Microsoft® Windows®, and MacOS® X. FLTK provides modern GUI functionality without the bloat and supports 3D graphics via OpenGL® and its built-in GLUT emulation.

FLTK is designed to be small and modular enough to be statically linked, but works fine as a shared library. FLTK also includes an excellent UI builder called FLUID that can be used to create applications in minutes.

Here are some quickstart screencasts