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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.
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