What GUI toolkit looks the best?

[Paul Rubin]

Brian Kelley <bkelley at wi.mit.edu> writes:
> Why forget Tkinter?  I've seen Tkinter applications that look
> incredibly fabulous.

Got any url's for screen shots?

> A lot depends on what you are trying to do.  If
> you are making a graphics-heavy application then Tkinter's canvas is
> pretty sweet.  I also think IDLE looks pretty good.

There will be some graphical icons and stuff like that which people
will click on, but no really heavy graphics or drawing tools in the
sense of a photo editor or anything like that.

> Glade isn't a GUI, it is a GUI builder that uses GTK.  In my
> experience, GTK doesn't look quite right on windows boxes, especially
> the menus.  Of course I have the same basic view of Qt and Swing so
> know you know my biases.

Oh ok, I understand a bit better now.

> I tend to use Tkinter for canvas heavy applications and wxPython for
> other stuff.

Is wxPython Windows specific?  I guess it is, but can I port the
screen layouts to some comparable Linux toolkit or anything like that?
The screen shots for it do look really nice.

> Here is my humble opinions in a nutshell (missing a lot here):
> wxPython has a grid control to die for and many, many classes, good
> printer support and looks like a native GTK app on Linux and a native
> app on windows and macintosh.

Oh wow, yes I guess it's cross platform then.  Hmm, what Micro$oft
tool do I need to build and run it?  Is Visual C++ enough?  I guess
I can get the client to pay for some stuff like that.  Also, is there
a Glade-like drag and drop gui editor for it?

> Qt is better for developing - it has a better class structure and I
> tend not to have to look up docs as often and can look really,
> really nice.

The KDE apps that I've seen look good but not really top notch.  Maybe
more attention could improve them.  They're certainly good enough for
practical use.

> Tkinter has a killer canvas and great postscript output.  GTK is
> really quite fast.

I think I don't care about heavy duty graphics or more than rudimentary
printing.  

> but don't take my word for this, why don't you see what you like the best?
> 
> http://www.wxpython.org/
> http://www.gtk.org/
> http://www.scriptics.com/
> http://www.trolltech.com/

I don't know what I can really tell from these without more experience
with them.  In particular, which is the most solid and reliable across
a wide range of Windows versions (95, 98, ..., XP whatever)?  That
matters too.

Thanks!

Paul