| This chapter covered a variety of topics for applying finishing touches to your application, and presented code to plug a few gaps left by wxWidgets. We've finished off with some tips and further reading to improve your awareness of UI design issues. We hope that having read this book, you will agree with us that by adopting wxWidgets, you get a very powerful set of tools bringing you highly compelling benefits, including these: Your applications will have a native look and feel. The rich variety of classes, including simple and advanced controls, lightweight HTML functionality, wizards, online help, multithreading, interprocess communication, streams, virtual file systems, and so on, makes programming in wxWidgets highly productive and enjoyable. You save money by using the same code on all platforms. You can easily port your applications to platforms you might not have considered before, such as Pocket PC and Mac OS X, gaining market share in the process. By using rapid application development tools such as DialogBlocks, and the powerful sizer mechanism, you can quickly create complex, attractive, resizable and (above all) portable dialogs and other windows. wxWidgets' open source nature lets you modify the library and understand its workings. You get the advantages of the large wxWidgets community for quickly resolving problems and answering questions, plus the many third-party contributions (see Appendix E for a list of controls and tools).
We do hope that you've enjoyed reading the book and browsing the samples and tools on the CD-ROM and are now eager to apply what you've learned to your own cross-platform applications! Good luck, and we look forward to seeing you soon on the wxWidgets mailing lists and forum. |
