QT(developed by Nokia i think... |
Qt (they use a small t and pronounce it as "cute") was originally developer by Trolltech who were bought by Nokia in 2008. Nokia have since sold the commercial rights to Digia, in 2011.
The other popular cross platform GUI toolkit is FLTK:
http://www.fltk.org/index.php
The GUIs this produce are not as pretty as Qt or wxWidgets, but they are lighter weight. This makes FLTK popular with writers of utility apps (who don't care about looks) and games (who do so much custom drawing that the look of standard widgets is irrelevent).
If you're interested, the wikipedia.org entries for the different toolkits list some the projects who use it, so you can get an idea of what they can do:
- wxWidgets : Audacity, BitTorrent, Code::Blocks, CodeLite, ...
- Qt : Autodesk Maya, Mathematica, Skype, VirtualBox, VLC media player, ...
- FLTK : Dillo. Open Movie Editor. Amnesia: The Dark Descent, ...
Note that MFC does not come with the express editions of Visual Studio. But a slightly outdated version is part of the WDK (Windows Driver Kit -- the new name for the Device Driver Kit, or DDK). Of course, you will not have all the wizards to help you with your code, so you'll have to do everything yourself.
How to compile MFC code in Visual C++ Express
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/30439/How-to-compile-MFC-code-in-Visual-C-Express
And there is another Microsoft specific possibility: the Windows Teplate Library (WTL):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/
This is built on top of ATL (the Active Template Library) which, like MFC, does not come with the express edition, but an earlier version is available in the WDK. It is lighter weight than MFC, and a good fit for smaller scale application. See this turtorial for more information:
Using the Windows Template Library Part 1: Getting Started
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/general-programming/using-the-windows-template-library-part-1-gett-r2042
Andy