Developing normal graphical applications

[MarekkPie]

Qt has its own WYSIWYG editor as well: Qt Creator.

[Ellohir]

Qt has its own WYSIWYG editor as well: Qt Creator.

I tried it. I shake remembering it. I hadn't found something that difficult since Blender (and didn't see anything like it until Tiled xD).

[nevon]

I guess buiding for a single OS will reduce the complexity quite a lot. I could just use quickly/PyGTK.

PyGTK is sort of outdated now with the release of Gtk3, but Gtk can still be used with Python using the introspection bindings - which is inherently cross-platform. Building an application for Windows, Linux and Mac OS is not really any harder than building for just one platform.

[miko]

I guess buiding for a single OS will reduce the complexity quite a lot. I could just use quickly/PyGTK.

PyGTK is sort of outdated now with the release of Gtk3, but Gtk can still be used with Python using the introspection bindings - which is inherently cross-platform. Building an application for Windows, Linux and Mac OS is not really any harder than building for just one platform.

Some more candidates:
lgi (for lua + gtk)
lua-alchemy (for flashplayer - so crossplatform, even if somehow limited).

[vrld]

But since every OS have support for basically the same things, there should be a small library that, based on what OS it runs on, finds an existing GUI library and applies the desired interface on top of that.

This isn't nearly as easy as you make it sound, but people have already done this. The result is wxWidgets. From their website:

Unlike other cross-platform toolkits, wxWidgets gives its applications a truly native look and feel because it uses the platform's native API rather than emulating the GUI.

While where at it, here's yet another candidate: clutter.
While I haven't used it, the idea is pretty cool: All GUI rendering is done via OpenGL, which means that the same GUI can run on mobile devices (using OpenGL ES). There is a number of bindings to clutter but afaik there is no Lua binding yet.

[miko]

While where at it, here's yet another candidate: clutter.
While I haven't used it, the idea is pretty cool: All GUI rendering is done via OpenGL, which means that the same GUI can run on mobile devices (using OpenGL ES). There is a number of bindings to clutter but afaik there is no Lua binding yet.

What about lgi, lgob or LuaGnome?

[T-Bone]

None of the Lua bindings I've seen above seem to make much sense to me. The only one that is designed like a stand-alone app that runs lua scripts is wxLuaFreeze, which I can't get to work. All the other ones seem to depend on a local installation of lua, which I find really strange. How would one distribute that? The only way I can think of is to make an install script that installs lua, downloads and compiles whatever tools you are using, and setting up the app. If that was possible to do with a simple script that always works, the tools themselves would've used them for installation, which they don't.

What's the point in developing an app you can't distribute in a decent way?

[miko]

None of the Lua bindings I've seen above seem to make much sense to me. The only one that is designed like a stand-alone app that runs lua scripts is wxLuaFreeze, which I can't get to work. All the other ones seem to depend on a local installation of lua, which I find really strange. How would one distribute that?

True. Then you can check murgaLua, which is fltk based. You get binaries for 3 platforms (win, mac, linux).

[T-Bone]

Holy crap, that came like a lightning bolt from a clear sky. Finally something with its feet on the ground. Sure, it comes with a bunch of stuff other than just the GUI, but that's not a problem. It seems small enought anyway. Will check it out.

EDIT: Totally works! The only issue I can see is that it doesn't get the native look for the OS. That's a pity, but it's still the best solution I've seen so far. The only exception I can see is wxLuaFreeze, which I still hope to get running.

EDIT2: I mean, if wxLuaFreeze has to be built from source, then it serves no purpose as it can't be distributed in a non-crazy way. If it doesn't have to be built from source, then where can I find a binary? I've been searching all over.

[AaronWizard]

A library I recently discovered while bored at work is libRocket. It's a C++ library meant to be embedded in other projects (like Lua ) and uses files based on HTML/CSS to define GUIs.

Actually, I was going to start a topic about how awesome it would be for Löve to integrate libRocket.