GUI programming
 

How to code GUIs, such as Windows, buttons, etc, apart from using Windows API?

What about GTK, or QT?

If you want to do it using c, try GTK+, and for C++ , there is Qt.

Or Java with Swing.
Perl and Python with Tk.

Or C++ with Gtkmm

This came across my mind yesterday. How to create buttons from scratch. You know, we have been using codes from the library, and the buttons that result are square, grey and kind of boring. I want to be able to create the buttons of different style (shape, color, etc). Not just the buttons, but also everything else like the widgets, windows, etc. Is that possible? How?

Well for this you have to create codings based on X11, i think. You have to design every bit of GUI for yourself, and I think that is a large amount of work. Why don't you just take a widget and customize it, using Qt or swings?

creating own new-shaped buttons is the easiest way of customizing controls. making new listboxes et cetera is more difficult than creating a new type of QPushbutton

but i think QT has the advantage, that controls are much more customizable than buttons in MFC, so try out the possibilities and "don't waste your few time for reinventing the wheel" ;)

afaik gtk2 is fully skinable... just look at gkrellm etc...

I think that what unixbrain needs is to do is to think about themes, artwork, icons and the artistic view of GUI.

Swing components can be customized easily as well.