Looks really good, and getting better with each update.
What language / which UI library do you use? It all looks very smooth, so I kind of doubt it's Visual Basic
Or anything MS related as it runs on all platforms.
Hi and thanks, you're too kind
(please excuse the somewhat rambling wall of text below, hope it answers your question!)
I developed Grid Cartographer v1.0 using C++ and DirectX9 in Visual Studio 2008 using my 'haEngine' (Hidden Asbestos Engine) as a foundation which is simply a collection of utility classes and functionality that I've built up over years of making little game projects and keeping the reusable parts of the code in working order. For this project haEngine lets me easily do things like draw flat shaded and textured rectangles and coloured lines which is really all you need to make a nice UI. It's also more like a game engine in that it redraws the whole screen every frame from within a single resizeable window. It's just that this looks like an art tool, not an FPS.
There isn't a named UI library at work here other than the Windows common controls for stuff like message boxes. For the most part I'm just drawing little textures for the icons and framing stuff with shaded rectangles and generally handling it all myself. It's how I like to make software and gives me the flexibility that I might otherwise lose from using a 3rd party solution. This is a somewhat questionable approach in the face of things available today (Qt, Unity, etc.) but I feel it has made development a lot faster for me since I'm much better at coding my own solutions than reading documentation and figuring out how to use (a potentially more powerful) library or tool. Knowing how everything works definitely helps when bugs occur too.
When the Linux version came along I switched in GTK to replace the native Windows calls for message boxes, menus and file selectors, and on Android I used the native O/S message boxes on there in a similar way. This time also coding my own menu system as a scrolling list for touch compatability. Everything else on those 2 platforms is OpenGL rendering, again very much a game engine approach and doing the same basic texture rectangle stuff to build up the UI.
In version 2 I've definitely got a lot more UI going on now but it's no different technologically. It's actually simpler since by removing the need for a native menu system I'm in control of even more stuff. This new UI was done to unify the desktop and touch versions and has meant I've needed to code up the ribbon style toolbars you see today. This isn't too hard to do though, it was actually way harder to try and make it look pretty (hope I've succeeded!) than it was to code. Removing the native menu system also makes porting to new platforms a bit easier too and ensures a consistent experience across all devices / platforms.
I'm soon about find out how much of a cliff making MacOSX work with my haEngine is
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