Hello David,

DR> Hmm.. does anyone have a MacOSX computer they can try
DR> out WideStudio on? I am curious to see if it is
DR> portable to the mac.

DR> WideStudio has plenty of widgets btw. I just didn't
DR> play enough with the wsbuilder.

Okay i downloaded the 100 MB Win Installer and played a bit with
wsbuilder. I must say that this toolkit can win the second price in
the most ugly toolkit competition (the first is for the all time
winner FLTK). And there is no theming to change this, looking at the
code shows me that there will be no theming for a very long time
because the drawing code is deeply buried in the source files.

I'm sure that the toolkit is more flexible, just because it uses a
TK like approach of managing/accessing attributes by string names. Maybe
not bad but quite different. The event procedures that simple
functions. So writting C++ code would require extra overhead, but it
is okay for different language bindings.

The documentation seems not be on the state of a 3.1 release. It
describes methods but not which properties are available. There seems
to be also no real tutorial for starters.  I must say that i don't
like FAQ like tutorials, that have a lot of "How to " titles but no
integrated 10 min learn the basics code.

From the technical point i don't like that the lib has no layout
mangement (only Delphi like anchors), a very bad option for everybody
who wants to do L10N. The implemented widgets are very very basic.
As a toolkit written in Japan there are of course unicode/MBCS (?)
handling routines. From the widget design it seems to be much much
harder to write or adapt widgets as it is in FOX/QT. I just looked at
the "WSClist.cpp" source code to find a place where i can overwrite
the item draw method to use my own custom draw hook. It's not
possible. But looking at the source code, hey man that code is ugly and
completely comment free. Other things, radio+check buttons must always
be grouped, so there seems to be also no good separation for
layout/logic in the toolkit.

So i think it is good that this is a dead project. Don't waste your
time to try to work with this toolkit. After working about 8 years
with writting GUI's i can tell you that the afford you need to bring
this upto date (compared to GTK/QT/FOX) is too expensive and i really
doubt that you will find so much programmers helping you.

Oh yes i forgot, the WxBuilder - the GUI builder - is nothing where
anybody want's to write larger dialogs.


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's