Why EZGUI ?

So why did I create EZGUI ? Why would a developer want to use EZGUI ?

There are a number of issues when dealing with Windows. A lot of software today tends to be bloated and to use too many resources, so there needs to be a better way to design applications with a small footprint. Next, since I use Powerbasic as a programming language and PowerBasic applications are built using the Windows API (or PowerBasics DDT command set which is a set of wrappers over the API), designing complex software is not always so easy to do. The problem is not with PowerBasic, but with the Windows API. The native Windows API are not always that easy to work with, especially when you want to do some of the more complex stuff.

EZGUI was designed to make GUI development faster and easier. It was also designed to provide access to some of the more powerful features in Windows, while still making it compatible with all versions of Windows, from Windows 95 to Windows 8 (desktop only). EZGUI’s extensive use of things like OwnerDraw allow it to provide more choices for UI development. EZGUI comes with a number of powerful custom controls built in, so you can do more than the basic stuff.

For example, lets look at just two of the custom controls that EZGUI 5.0 comes with than demonstrate this power.

The Canvas control is an extremely powerful graphic control. It provides things like double buffers and direct access to pixel data, so you can write advanced low level graphic code. It also has its own proprietary 2D Sprite engine with things like anti-aliasing, frame animation and alphablending. And this all works on Windows 95 to Windows 8 and even with WINE on Linux.

Next we have the glCanvas control, which builds on the Canvas control by adding a top layer using OpenGL. It has its own proprietary 3D scripting language to define and animate 3D objects. It even supports an industry standard STL 3D model file format, so you can display 3D models with thousands of polygons for amazing detail. Even a low end 3D Graphics card today (in the $50 range) can get a frame rate of 10 or more FPS with a 3D model with half a million triangles. Thats a lot of polygons ! OpenGL allows EZGUI to provide 3D Graphics on a wide range of Windows platforms, from Windows 95 to Windows 8.

By providing a powerful layer between your application and the Windows API, you not only get a lot of powerful fetaures, but you also get better reliability from your software, since EZGUI decreases the number of problems you can have with using the Windows API directly.