I am very pleased by this news, as using Wireshark on the Mac is not a pleasant visual experience.
However, having only casually looked at both Qt and wxWidgets, how do MODERN versions of both compare?
Doing something with a GUI toolkit is something I'd like to visit at some point in the future, and Qt seems to have more mindshare, but from what I understand Qt doesn't actually draw native widgets, merely emulated ones. Reading about MOC and seeing the number of .dll's included with the average Qt project also put me off a bit.
My experience with wxWidgets is that it's full with leaky abstraction... Not really wxWidgets fault here, but the philosophy - they wrap native widgets under common interface.
To give you an example - getting the current line or number of lines from wxTextBox control on Windows might in fact do way more than what you expect (the leaky abstraction) - it sends a message to the control to get size/current line - but what that does internally could be something which scans the buffer over and over - so if you have a hundreth of megabyte window with text (log screen) - you might have severe slowdowns.
Also I've found it very hard to extend with custom widget and make it right. Qt is much easier, while MFC has been the hardest for me. Juce is also easy, and I guess gtk would be too.
> using Wireshark on the Mac is not a pleasant visual experience.
I personally do not give a flying fart what the "visual experience" is as long as it works and the interface is very usable.
You know who said something similar in the last few years? Jony Ive at Apple. Even though I like the concept of flat design and really wanted to like iOS 7 at first, it is the first time since Jobs left the world that they royally fucked over the UI. And it was in the name of "visual experience". It's hard to believe they even tested it on humans. To tell you how bad I think it is: I used it for days in inverse color mode, because that was better. If you've used that for a while, you know what that means.
I know they tried and they got some things right, but that is the reason you give interface to UE people, NOT designers. Great designers don't make great interfaces. They make great designs.
So, screw the visual bells and whistles. Give me emacs and midnight commander.
However, having only casually looked at both Qt and wxWidgets, how do MODERN versions of both compare?
Doing something with a GUI toolkit is something I'd like to visit at some point in the future, and Qt seems to have more mindshare, but from what I understand Qt doesn't actually draw native widgets, merely emulated ones. Reading about MOC and seeing the number of .dll's included with the average Qt project also put me off a bit.