Although these are the main toolkits for GUI development, there are a number of other options. Cross-platform toolkits, such as WxWidgets and Qt, for example, are relatively popular on *NIX and Windows. They are much less common on OS X due to the strength of the platform’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). These, and the way in which the developer tools make it easy to follow them, mean that most Cocoa and Carbon applications look and, more importantly, behave in a certain way that users expect. There are a number of examples of this, such as the placement of buttons in dialog boxes, the orders of menus, and even the shortcuts used to jump around in a text field.
Using a cross-platform toolkit often mirrors the look, but not the feel, of a native application. In many ways, this is the worst possible combination, because users miss out on the visual clues that an application will not behave as they expect. One of the worst offenders in this respect has been the Qt framework from Trolltech, which managed to provide an Aqua look for applications but, for many releases, got basic things like the shortcut keys for skipping forward and backward in a text field wrong. This is very jarring for users and is likely to make them dislike your application, even if they can’t quite identify why.
Because of this, there are far fewer successful applications on OS X using cross-platform GUI toolkits than on other systems. This is not to say that crossplatform development is not a good idea, however. It is possible to implement many applications with a clean abstraction layer between the GUI and the rest of the code, allowing a different GUI to be plugged in on every platform. A good example of this is the VLC media player, which is popular on Windows, *NIX, and Mac OS X. It has a number of user interfaces, including a Cocoa GUI and even a small web server allowing it to be controlled remotely.
If you can separate out your application in this way, it is possible to make a portable application that looks and feels polished on all platforms. If you use GNUstep on other platforms, then you can use the Cocoa Foundation libraries in your core logic and either use GNUstep or write a native GUI for each other platform you choose to support. Alternatively, you can use a framework that you are more experienced with for your core logic and just write a Cocoa GUI on top of it. Not every application needs to have a graphical interface, of course. OS X contains a rich set of developer tools for building command-line systems. Pure C, Python, Ruby, or shell scripts designed for UNIX-like systems will often run unmodified on the system.
Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)
Using a cross-platform toolkit often mirrors the look, but not the feel, of a native application. In many ways, this is the worst possible combination, because users miss out on the visual clues that an application will not behave as they expect. One of the worst offenders in this respect has been the Qt framework from Trolltech, which managed to provide an Aqua look for applications but, for many releases, got basic things like the shortcut keys for skipping forward and backward in a text field wrong. This is very jarring for users and is likely to make them dislike your application, even if they can’t quite identify why.
Because of this, there are far fewer successful applications on OS X using cross-platform GUI toolkits than on other systems. This is not to say that crossplatform development is not a good idea, however. It is possible to implement many applications with a clean abstraction layer between the GUI and the rest of the code, allowing a different GUI to be plugged in on every platform. A good example of this is the VLC media player, which is popular on Windows, *NIX, and Mac OS X. It has a number of user interfaces, including a Cocoa GUI and even a small web server allowing it to be controlled remotely.
If you can separate out your application in this way, it is possible to make a portable application that looks and feels polished on all platforms. If you use GNUstep on other platforms, then you can use the Cocoa Foundation libraries in your core logic and either use GNUstep or write a native GUI for each other platform you choose to support. Alternatively, you can use a framework that you are more experienced with for your core logic and just write a Cocoa GUI on top of it. Not every application needs to have a graphical interface, of course. OS X contains a rich set of developer tools for building command-line systems. Pure C, Python, Ruby, or shell scripts designed for UNIX-like systems will often run unmodified on the system.
Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)
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