Learning to program

[cjrmail2k]

Hey everyone,

I want to be able to make gui front ends for already-developed cli programs like ffmpeg or mencoder. I have only ever done a small amount of programming (in VB6 ) a LONG time ago. Where do I start? I have been using linux for about a year now and thought its about time I started _trying_ to contribute.

Is there a specific program that I can use to create these GUI's? And hopefully something that is easy to learn and has good documentation/support.

Thank you
Chris

[hazel]

You will need to use a widget library: either gtk for gnome or qt for KDE. You will already have one of these installed, perhaps both, and they come with excellent documentation (at least gtk does). You just need to learn the functions for creating the widgets, packing them into a window, and binding them to handler functions. Basically you need widgets for the user to set preferences, handlers that assign command arguments reflecting these, and a handler to execute the command with the appropriate arguments.

[i92guboj]

I'd start using QT as my toolkit but that's just my personal prefference. The documentation is excelent in any case. If you choose QT you can use kdevelop as a full blown IDE, though I usually preffer simple editors like kate.

You can start here:

Online Reference Documentation

Pick a version and you will see all the docs for that version of the toolkit, and some tutorials and examples to get you started.

[cjrmail2k]

Thank you both, I will look into this. I guess its just about practice from here on out. Happy the documentation is good though.

C