Features

The TOAD C++ GUI Library provides some standard features found in other GUI libraries like

• Model-View Architecture
• UTF-8 text encoding
• True color and color dithering on 4 to 8 bit display depths
• ISO C++ Template based Signal & Slot style callbacks
  Signal & Slots is the name of the callback technique in the Qt C++ GUI library which requires an additional preprocessor while TOAD achieves the same with C++ templates.
  Experience shows that keeping track of callbacks in complex applications is too complicated so a new idea is to introduce a central database of callbacks.

• Closures
  Well not real closures but closure alike constructs for callbacks. The current implementation uses preprocessor macros but using C++ templates by provide some advantages in the future.

• Platform independent font specification via fontconfig
  (for both X11 and FreeType fonts)

• Pluggable Layout Managers
• 2D vector graphic editor
• Postscript, PDF and SVG output (through the Cairo graphics library)
• high quality UTF-8 text rendering (through Gtks Pango library)
• Minimal HTML Viewer for Online Documentation

The following features are unique:

• Decoupled Menubar
  Methods and the menubar/toolbar are connected automatically over the window hierarchy.
  This not only simplifies the creation of menubars but also allows automatic handling of different menu styles like the single menubar under MacOS X or the typical one menubar per window under X11.

• Decoupled Undo Management
  Undo objects and undomangers/menubars are connected automatically over the window hierarchy.

• Runtime Layout Editor
  Layouts of dialogs, menubars, formlayouts, etc. can be configured at runtime.

Other planned features are, for example, a C++ scripting language to create a complete User Interface Management System (UIMS) for Rapid Prototyping.