wxWidgets 2.9.1 Release Notes ============================= Welcome to the latest release of wxWidgets, a cross-platform C++ framework for writing advanced GUI applications using native controls where possible. In addition to common and advanced GUI facilities such as frames, scrolling windows, toolbars, tree controls, icons, device contexts, printing, splitter windows and so on, there are wrappers for common file operations, and facilities for writing TCP/IP applications, thread handling, and more. A detailed reference manual including in-depth overviews for various topics is supplied in various formats and can be accessed online at http://docs.wxwidgets.org/ Note about naming: while 2.9.1 is called a "development" release, this only means that API is not guaranteed to remain unchanged in the subsequent 2.9.x releases, unlike in the stable 2.8.x branch. We believe the current version is stable and suitable for use in production environment. Changes in this release ----------------------- This release contains several years worth of improvements compared to 2.8 version. Notably, Unicode support has been completely overhauled and made much easier to use. Debugging support, including when using a release build of the library, was much improved making it less likely that you use the library incorrectly. Many new GUI and base classes have been added or improved. Please see the file docs/changes.txt for more details and make sure to read the section "Incompatible changes since 2.8" if you upgrade from a previous wxWidgets release. This release introduces many important changes and we are looking forward to your feedback about them. In particular please let us know about any regressions compared to the previous versions (see the section "Bug reporting" below) so that we could fix them before 3.0 release. Platforms supported ------------------- wxWidgets currently supports the following primary platforms: - Windows 95/98/ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 - Most Unix variants using the GTK+ toolkit (version 2.4 or newer) - Mac OS X (10.4 or newer) using either Carbon or Cocoa There is some support for the following platforms: - Most Unix variants with X11 - Most Unix variants with Motif/Lesstif - Most Unix variants with GTK+ 1.2 - OS/2 - Windows CE (Pocket PC) Most popular C++ compilers are supported; see the install.txt file for each platform (available via docs/html/index.htm) and http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Supported_Platforms for the most up to date status. Files ----- The distribution is available in archive formats appropriate to the target system. See the download pages for details. Installation ------------ wxWidgets needs to be compiled before you can test out the samples or write your own applications. For installation information, please see the install.txt file in the docs subdirectory appropriate for the platform you use. Licence information ------------------- For licensing information, please see the files: docs/preamble.txt docs/licence.txt docs/licendoc.txt docs/gpl.txt docs/lgpl.txt Although this may seem complex, it is there to allow authors of proprietary/commercial applications to use wxWidgets in addition to those writing GPL'ed applications. In summary, the licence is LGPL plus a clause allowing unrestricted distribution of application binaries. To answer a FAQ, you don't have to distribute any source if you wish to write commercial applications using wxWidgets. However, if you distribute wxGTK or wxMotif (with Lesstif) version of your application, don't forget that it is linked against GTK+ (or Lesstif) which is covered by LGPL *without* exception notice. Under Linux systems your app is probably linked against LGPL glibc as well. Please read carefully LGPL, section 6. which describes conditions for distribution of closed source applications linked against LGPL library. Basically you should link dynamically and include source code of LGPL libraries with your product (unless it is already present in user's system - like glibc usually is). If you use TIFF image handler, please see src/tiff/COPYRIGHT for libtiff licence details. If you use JPEG image handler, documentation for your program should contain following sentence: "This software is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group". See src/jpeg/README for details. If you use wxRegEx class on a system without native regular expressions support (i.e. MS Windows), see src/regex/COPYRIGHT file for Henry Spencer's regular expression library copyright. If you use wxXML classes or XRC, see src/expat/COPYING for licence details. Documentation ------------- wxWidgets documentation is available online at http://docs.wxwidgets.org/2.9.1/ and can also be downloaded in HTML format. To generate documentation in other formats (PDF, CHM, ...) please use the scripts in docs/doxygen directory. Bug reporting ------------- The wxWidgets bug tracker can be browsed at: http://trac.wxwidgets.org/report Please use the search function of our Trac installation to find any possibly relevant bugs before reporting new ones. Also please notice that often trying to correct the bug yourself is the quickest way to fix it. Even if you fail to do it, you may discover valuable information allowing us to fix it while doing it. We also give much higher priority to bug reports with patches fixing the problems so this ensures that your report will be addressed sooner. Further information ------------------- The wxWidgets Web site is located at: http://www.wxwidgets.org The main wxWidgets ftp site is at: ftp://biolpc22.york.ac.uk/pub A wxWidgets CD-ROM with the latest distribution plus an HTML front-end and hundreds of MB of compilers, utilities and other material may be ordered from the CD-ROM page: see the wxWidgets web site. Have fun! The wxWidgets Team, July 2010