IMPORTANT!
=========
Guichan is currently in a beta stage. This means that the API is not fixed and may
change in the future. Every API change will break compatibility between older
versions of Guichan.

INTRODUCTON TO GUICHAN
======================
Guichan is a C++ GUI library designed for games. It comes with a standard set of 
'widgets' and can use several different objects for displaying graphics and 
capturing user input.
Guichan has an abstract design which allows users of Guichan to use different 
objects for displaying of graphics and grabbing of user input. Guichan comes with 
three implemented graphics objects (SDLGraphics, OpenGLGraphics and AllegroGraphics)
and two implemented input objects (SDLInput and AllegroInput). Due to Guichan's 
extendible nature, new objects can also be created by the developer to suit their 
needs.
As Guichan is designed for games, Guichan lacks many features of more advanced GUI 
libraries (such as GTK and QT). However, a game developer may not normally require 
all the advanced features of the larger GUI libraries. Guichan aims to keep small 
and simple, thus avoiding the complication and large dependencies found with some 
other GUI libraries. Guichan is small but contains all basic GUI features making it 
ideal for games.

Guichan allows the developer control over the initialization of external libraries, 
giving a degree of freedom which is almost required in game development, but not 
provided by some GUI libraries. Guichan should not be considered a full GUI library 
but rather a tool or helper library for game development.

The basic nature of Guichan means that it comes with a small number of default 
widgets. There exists no themes or theme handling for Guichan, as their 
implementation would increase the size and complexity of the library unnecessarily. 
Instead, the developer creates their own new widgets by inheriting from the standard
widgets or by overloading standard widget functions. This makes Guichan much more 
flexible for customisation than theme based GUIs, and more natural to use for C++ 
developers, as they need only learn the API instead of a whole new theming system.

FOR MORE INFORMATION AND DOWNLOADS
==================================
For more general information about Guichan and/or downloads related to Guichan 
please visit the Guichan homepage at http://guichan.sourceforge.net.

GETTING HELP WITH GUICHAN
=========================
If you need help with Guichan, the best way to proceed is to ask questions either
by joining the users mailing list or by joining our forum. Information about 
Guichan's mailing lists and our forum is found at the Guichan homepate at 
http://guichan.sourceforge.net.


GETTING INVOLVED WITH GUICHAN DEVELOPMENT
=========================================
If you want to get involved with Guichan development, the best way to proceed is to
suggest improvements to Guichan either by joining the developers mailing list or
by joining our forum. Information about Guichan's mailing lists and our forum is
found at the Guichan homepate at http://guichan.sourceforge.net.

By Olof Naessén 2006-06-30.