Affinity GUI Framework

[SlipperyBrick]

Hi,

This is mainly a question aimed at the developers. I am very interested in knowing what GUI framework was used to develop the Affinity line of products. Was it Qt? Or WPF? Were the modules of Affinity programmed in C# or C++ (I imagine it was C++ considering the rendering operations for drawing)

This is very off topic from questions pertained to Affinity products but I am a C/C++ developer and have been looking for a good framework that enables rendering of both 2D and 3D graphics without the need for implementing a rendering engine with graphics API's such as OpenGL or Vulkan, etc. I like the look and reponsiveness of the Affinity products and was hoping a developer could share some insights into the front and back-end technologies used to develop the Affinity line of products.

Cheers!

[v_kyr]

See the license.rtf (Open Source Code used in Affinity) file which is part and included of every Affinity app installment. This tells you which third party C++/C frameworks, libs & modules have been used!

For the 2D and 3D graphics stuff see ...

• https://agg.sourceforge.net/antigrain.com/
• https://github.com/ghaerr/agg-2.6
• https://github.com/cppfw/agg
• ... etc.

Further inspect the supplied app libs!

[SlipperyBrick]

Ah very interesting, it looks like WPF is used for Windows, and an old post says Objective-C was used for Mac (never developed natively for Mac, have no experience with it). Two code bases for the front-end, that is surprising.

I've started using Qt6 and wanted to have a similar type of window as the Affinity products have (a frameless window) but realised that making a window frameless then relies on you as a developer to implement the OS window handling events to get the look and feel of the OS back; this is for the animations such has snapping the window and expanding it, minimizing it, etc.

I think my approach will now be to have separate implementations for each OS window and aggregate my other widget classes that make up my GUI, this way I can have a single code base for my GUI that looks the same across platforms.

Cheers for the response though! Have a good New Year!

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, SlipperyBrick said:

I think my approach will now be to have separate implementations for each OS window and aggregate my other widget classes that make up my GUI, this way I can have a single code base for my GUI that looks the same across platforms.

Beside that you can better reuse/support the OS related APIs & services.