The Open Source Zone

FOX is a C++ based Toolkit for developing Graphical User Interfaces easily and  effectively. It offers a wide, and growing, collection of Controls, and provides  state of the art facilities such as drag and drop, selection, as well as OpenGL  widgets for 3D graphical manipulation. FOX also implements icons, images, and  user-convenience features such as status line help, and tooltips.  Tooltips may even be used for 3D objects!

 Considerable importance has been placed on making FOX one of the fastest  toolkits around, and to minimize memory use:- FOX uses a number of techniques  to speed up drawing and spatial layout of the GUI. Memory is conserved by  allowing programmers to create and destroy GUI elements on the fly.

 Even though FOX offers a large collection of Controls already, FOX leverages C++  to allow programmers to easily build additional Controls and GUI elements,  simply by taking existing controls, and creating a derived class which simply  adds or redefines the desired behavior.

 One of the prime design goals of FOX is the ease of programming; thus, most  controls can be created using a single line of C++ code; most parameters have  sensible default values, so that they may be omitted, and layout managers ensure  that designers of GUI's do not have to worry about precise alignments.

 Another nice feature of FOX which significantly reduces the number of lines of  code which have to be written is FOX's ability to have widgets connect to each  other, and passing certain commands between them; for example, a menu entry Hide  Toolbar can be directly connected to the Toolbar, and cause it to hide.

 Finally, FOX makes it easy to maintain the state of the GUI in an application  by having the GUI elements automatically updating themselves by interrogating  the application's state. This feature eliminates the large amount of effort that  may go into sensitizing, graying out, checking/unchecking etc. depending on  the application state.