GUI Programming C++ for Mac OS X Lion

Question

I'm probably going to get abuse for this question but here goes. Oh but before you tear into me and tell to crawl back under a rock etc. I have looked high and low and nothing has helped me so far either the software libs are out of date and for some reason wont work on lion.

Ok other than Qt is there any other lightweight opensource GUI library for C++ on mac? I have tried this wxWidgets doesn't work for some reason. Apple don't seem to offer that carbon crap anymore or can I use openGL to create GUI's? I just want a simple nicely documented GUI lib without having to switch to windows to develop. or will I have to spend some money on one or resort to Qt.

Hope someone can help and thanks!

Answer 1

Why not use Cocoa (the native way to develop OSX GUIs) in the first place? You must use the Objective-C calls to create windows for example, but you can mix this code with C++ code in the same file - this is then called Objective-C++ and it is supported by clang and the gcc.

To build completely native-looking OSX Applications, you need Cocoa. Every other toolkit that can create those native GUIs calls Cocoa (at least to my knowledge).

Just as a pointer: have you tried SDL?

Answer 2

FLTK is simple and very stable GUI library. Runs on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Non-native look though.

Here is a screenshot of an app I built with it a few years ago, and that still runs great on Lion.

Answer 3

I'd take a look at both GLUT and GLUI as simple extensions to OpenGL that provide basic widgets. They can be used together to some degree, but I personally have run into a couple issues in that department. Either one in isolation is pretty simple to use if you're familiar with OpenGL though.

EDIT: Also, X11 can run in OS X, although I'm not familiar enough with the system to know how to get started with that.