Framework for building visually rich desktop applications?

Question

Hi,

I've started building an app with Flex/Air but am getting sick of it's clunkyness.

The app that I'm building has similar behaviour to Prezi (www.prezi.com) but in a completely different field.

I'm looking for something on the desktop which has flex like capabilities, such as drawing vectors then zooming in/out, rotating etc, gui widgets would be a bonus but not essential.

If it was written in Python/Ruby or had an abstraction in either language that would be great.

I've had a quick look at PyGame and Pyglet but am not sure of their suitability.

Any ideas?

Cheers,

Chris

Answer 1

Qt (Python bindings: PyQt) is a flexible and mature framework that can certainly do that (take a look at QGraphicsView and QGraphicsScene for example).

You'll have to code most of it 'by hand' though (the designer is good for standard GUI widgets but is lacking functionality in this particular area).

Answer 2

If you have any .NET experience I would recommend Silverlight. I have worked with it in the academic setting and it has impressed me very much. Some of the examples are pretty mind blowing, for the web applications at least. I also know they did focus on making silverlight into exactly what your question asks, a framework for building "visually rich" desktop applications also. There is a set of tools called expression blend that interact directly with visual studio to build the GUI and it's pretty impressive the control their GUI gives you in making your GUI. At least worth a look.