wx Sightings in the Wild

I've just discovered (please don't laugh as apparently everyone else made this discovery a year or at least half a year ago but better late than never) a nice solution for synchronizing files between different machines called Dropbox. For those of you who are as ignorant as me, it's basically a way to transparently rsync files (up to 2GB for free) with Amazon S3 storage. The transparent part is nice as it means that you just run a daemon monitoring the dropbox directory in an efficient way (using inotify under Linux and, my guess would be, using ReadDirectoryChangesW() under Windows) and don't have to manually commit and update your files as I was doing so far, using a central CVS server (from which I'm slowly moving to an hg one). And, unlike CVS, Dropbox also provides a nice way to access your files from any JavaScript-enabled browser (which is more convenient than hg web interface but then it's not at all meant to do the same thing).


The only problem with Dropbox is that the daemon part of their product is not open source. This is really a pity but it also explains why I started looking at its internals at all -- only to discover that it is written using wx, more precisely wxPython. It's not the most demanding GUI application in existence but it's still nice to see that an application used by many (how many? I don't know but judging from amount of stuff written about it on the web this must be one of the most widely used wx applications in existence) people is written in wx and apparently nobody complains about its GUI.

So while I'll probably mostly continue to use hg myself, I'll certainly recommend it to my less DVCS-inclined friends and relatives. And if any of the readers of this blog want to try it out, don't hesitate to use my affiliate link to register and get extra 250MB of space for both you and me.