Where do I start learning about GUI programming? [closed]

Answer 1

I'l try the book About face: Essential of User Interface Design, its centered on design practices for UI as well as designing taking into account the user goals, that is, what the user wants to acomplish trying to get you away for the "developer GUI design".

It also reviews some history about GUI design from Microsoft, Apple and other companys. Things like defaults for MacOsX (where the accept and cancel buttons are usually located, etc) as well and the whys beneath that.

I'll also look up the Office 2007 UI Design Guidelines for Microsoft as it's probably "gonna be a thing".

Answer 2

Take a look at Glade and Gtk. Both are really easy to use. Glade is the GUI builder, and Gtk the toolkit. It's both cross platform and cross language. You can load the Glade files in almost any language. Here is a Glade/Gtk tutorial

Answer 3

Java's Swing API is cross platform and relatively simple, and NetBeans is a good GUI builder.

Answer 4

I was thinking exactly the same thing recently. Qt seems like a good cross platform GUI framework, and Python seems like a good language to work in.

So PyQt is my (uneducated) suggestion. It does include a drag and drop GUI design tool.

Answer 5

I would look into C# .NET development and its WinForms API. It's much easier to program GUI desktop apps for Windows with that than with the Win32 API. You can always ease into Win32 API stuff later, if it's still relevant.

For cross-platform solutions, look into Gtk+, perhaps PyGtk. Another good one is WxWidgets.

If you want to get really funky, check out Shoes for Ruby.

Answer 6

You're looking for Qt. It's a cross-platform C++ GUI framework, and it includes everything you asked for and more.

It's free for open-source projects to use, provided you're using the GPL.