Ultra App Kit is a new cross-platform, user interface toolkit option focused on satisfying the needs of game engines/tooling but also covering needs for other desktop GUI applications.
Sunday’s release of Ultra App Kit 1.1 delivers on Linux and macOS support complementing its prior Windows support. Josh Klint of the Ultra Engine project wrote into Phoronix further explaining some of his motivation with Ultra App Kit, “I’m the developer who brought Leadwerks Game Engine to Linux a few years ago. I’m working on new game development technology and the first stage I am releasing is a cross-platform GUI toolkit that includes support for Linux. I had a pretty rough time wrangling with GTK for Leadwerks, which lead me to replace it with my own GUI system written directly on X11/XRender (and GDI+ / Quartz on Windows and Mac, respectively). The GUI toolkit was first released in April of this year, and now version 1.1 is released, adding Linux and Mac support. I plan to use this to build new game development tools, but it’s also available now as a standalone product for other developers to build GUI applications with.“
The v1.1 announcement does proclaim, “Builds on Linux use minimal dependencies and will work on virtually any distro without any additional libraries to install. This effectively solves the Linux user interface problem forever and provides us with a strong foundation on which to build new game development tools that look great and run everywhere.” But, yes, it indeed relies on X11 without native Wayland support yet.
An Ultra App Kit example on Ubuntu Linux.
This though isn’t a free software UI toolkit but costs $19.99 USD for a key or $1.99 monthly. Those wanting to learn more about Ultra App Kit can do so at UltraEngine.com.
