docs/univ/readme.txt

   1                               wxUniversal README
   2                               ==================
   3
   4  Welcome to wxUniversal!
   5
   6  Acknowledgements: wxUniversal wouldn't have been written without the
   7 generous support of SciTech Software. Many thanks to Kendall Bennett and
   8 Tom Ryan!
   9
  10 0. Introduction
  11 ---------------
  12
  13  wxUniversal is a port of wxWindows which implements the various GUI controls
  14 by drawing them itself (using low level wxWindows classes). Please see
  15
  16                      http://www.wxwindows.org/wxuniv.htm
  17
  18 for more details about it.
  19
  20  The advantage of wxUniversal is that you have precise control over the
  21 controls' appearance (it is not always possible to change all aspects of the
  22 native controls) and the theme support: the same program may be changed to
  23 look completely differently without changing a single line of its code but
  24 just changing the theme.
  25
  26  Another advantage is that it makes writing ports of wxWindows for other
  27 platforms (such as OS/2, BeOS or QNX) much simpler, so it is of special
  28 interest to people interested in porting wxWindows to another platform.
  29
  30  However, wxUniversal doesn't have a 100% native look and feel unlike the
  31 other wxWindows ports - this is the price to pay for the extra flexibility.
  32
  33 1. Requirements and supported platforms
  34 ---------------------------------------
  35
  36  wxUniversal is used together with another wxWindows port which provides the
  37 "low level classes" mentioned above. Currently it can be built with wxMSW,
  38 wxGTK or wxX11. In any case, you should download the sources for the
  39 appropriate toolkit in addition to wxUniversal - in fact, you should download
  40 them first and then unpack wxUniversal in the same directory.
  41
  42  The requirements for wxUniversal are the same as for the underlying low level
  43 toolkit.
  44
  45 2. Installing under Win32
  46 -------------------------
  47
  48 a) Using Visual C++ 6.0
  49
  50    Simply open the src/wxUniv.dsw file in DevStudio and build it.
  51    Then open the widgetsUniv.dsp file in samples/widgets to build
  52    the widgets sample.
  53
  54 b) Cygwin
  55
  56    Please refer to the Unix section below
  57
  58 c) Other compilers
  59
  60    Unfortunately we don't have makefiles for any other compilers yet.
  61 Please contact us if you would like to help us with creating one for the
  62 compiler you use.
  63
  64 Note that you can use the wxUniversal classes, wxMSW and MicroWindows (from
  65 Century Software) to build a different variant of wxUniversal than that
  66 documented here. Please see docs/univ/readme.txt for further information.
  67
  68 3. Installing under Unix
  69 ------------------------
  70
  71 Please refer to the installation instructions for wxGTK or wxX11. The only
  72 change for wxUniversal is that you must add "--enable-universal" switch to
  73 the configure command line and for wxX11 even this is unnecessary, i.e. it
  74 is enabled by default.
  75
  76 4. Running wxUniv programs
  77 --------------------------
  78
  79 wxUniv programs all honour the standard option "--theme" which allows to
  80 specify the theme to be used by name. Currently there are the following
  81 themes:
  82
  83 a) win32 -- Windows 95 look and feel
  84 b) metal -- based on win32 but with gradient backgrounds
  85 c) gtk   -- GTK+ 1.x standard look and feel
  86
  87 Thus, to launch a program using gtk theme you may do "./program --theme=gtk".
  88
  89 It is also possible to change the default theme for all wxUniv applications
  90 at once by setting the environment variable WXTHEME to the theme name.
  91
  92 5. Documentation and support
  93 ----------------------------
  94
  95  Please note that wxUniversal is not as mature as the other wxWindows ports
  96 and is currently officially in alpha stage. In particular, it is not really
  97 intended for the end users but rather for developers at the current stage and
  98 this is why we don't provide any binaries for it.
  99
 100  There is no separate documentation for wxUniversal, please refer to wxWindows
 101 documentation instead.
 102
 103  Support for wxUniversal is available from the same places as for wxWindows
 104 itself, namely:
 105
 106 * Usenet newsgroup comp.soft-sys.wxwindows
 107
 108 * Mailing lists: see http://lists.wxwindows.org/ for more information
 109
 110 * WWW page: http://www.wxwindows.org/
 111
 112
 113  Hope you find wxUniversal useful!
 114
 115                                                                  Vadim Zeitlin
 116
 117
 118 This file is accurate for the version 2.3.3 of wxUniversal. It was last
 119 modified on Apr 15, 2002.
 120