Have any applications developers here used wxWidgets? It is a newer alternative to GTK and QT, which is described in their FAQ as follows:
What is wxWidgets?
wxWidgets is a class library that allows you to compile graphical C++ programs on a range of different platforms. wxWidgets defines a common API across platforms, but uses the native graphical user interface (GUI) on each platform, so your program will take on the native ‘look and feel’ that users are familiar with.
Looking like a native app is a big plus and cross-platform is a big plus. My concern then would be with how it compares in the performance of apps that it produces, and its ease of use.
EDIT: I see that it’s been around since 1992, beginning life as an academic project, so it can’t be said to be “newer” than those other two. Still, it appears to be in current development.
I’ve heard it described as “ugly”, so I don’t know. Visual appeal is certainly very important, as Apple (a very successful company) have shown with all their products; they have almost made a religion from the gadget as elegant and fashionable-looking object…
In general I take the longer path for cross-platform code (I assume that’s your goal with it).
As @smacz said, these gui libraries are often enormous headaches, and it’s rather easy to write code on Linux, copy it over to Windows and change the system calls + compile in visual basic, move to Mac and change the system calls again + compile with xcode.
Depending on the scale of the program you probably don’t have too many OS-specific system calls anyway.
It can be some trouble, but you can’t beat native code built with the native compiler. I don’t care what the newest cross-platform gui-wrapper is that’s seriously-way-better, it’s adding a ton of overhead to your code and it usually ends with you having to dive into their libraries to debug.
Of course if it’s a for-fun program then maybe a gui-wrapper is easier and you don’t mind cross-compiling.
It’s newer to me.