1. Zinc Cross-Platform Toolkit
Zinc (http://www.zinc.com) is a well-established cross-platform toolkit,
available for Windows, Linux, Unix, the Mac, and embedded systems. They've
been struggling with the market for some time. A while ago, they were
letting people download free 'personal' versions of their toolkit, but not
allowing distribution of programs written in those toolkits.
Zinc was purchased by WindRiver, a company that specializes in embedded
technology. They appear to have given up on supporting the Zinc toolkit on
desktop and concentrating on the embedded portion of Zinc instead. They have
released Zinc for free commercial use on the following platforms:
- Windows 95
- Windows 98
- Windows NT
- Sun OS4
- Sun Solaris 2
- HPUX 9
- HPUX 10
- IBM AIX 4
- Digital Unix 3
- SGI Irix 6
- SCO OpenServer 5
- Linux 2.0.30
- Linux 2.0.31
The *nix support requires the desktop to have "the full X/Motif API"
(bleah), and the Mac port seems to have disappeared from the site. I don't
have a clue how easy this stuff would be to wrap into a DLL, or even if it
would be possible.
Despite being a C++ library, Zinc used to be my top choice for a
cross-platform library, especially with Mac support. But wxWindows
(http://www.wxwindows.org) now appears to be a better choice, since they've
ported to version 2.0. They support more platforms, and have more options.
For example, on the *nix platforms, you can use either Motif or GTK (a Qt
port is also under consideration).
In any event, I thought I'd mention it because Euphoria still hasn't got a
cross-platform GUI library.
-- David Cuny
