wxWidgets 3.0.0 Release Notes ============================= Welcome to the latest release of wxWidgets, a free cross-platform C++ framework for writing advanced GUI applications using native controls. 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, facilities for writing network applications, thread handling, and so on. You can learn more about wxWidgets at http://www.wxwidgets.org/ wxWidgets sources are available for download from https://sourceforge.net/projects/wxwindows/files/3.0.0/ or ftp://ftp.wxwidgets.org/pub/3.0.0/ Please see the "Files" section below for the description of various files available at these locations. 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/3.0.0/ 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. Dynamic event handling was made much more comfortable. Many new GUI and base classes have been added or improved and all ports, and especially wxOSX/Cocoa and wxGTK3, were enhanced. Compared to the previous 2.9 development releases the most important change is that this release is part of the new 3.0 stable series, guarantying backwards API and ABI compatibility with the next 3.0.x releases. 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! 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 2.6 or newer) - Mac OS X (10.5 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 - Most Unix variants with GTK+ 3 (still in development) - 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 ----- wxWidgets is distributed in source form in several archive formats. ZIP and 7z archives are for Microsoft Windows users and contain the files with DOS/Windows line endings while the compressed tar archives for Unix systems users (including OS X) and contain the files with Unix line endings. Please notice that some Windows tools still don't accept files with Unix line endings and that compiling sources with DOS line endings under Unix will fail, so please choose the correct file for your system. In addition to the sources, documentation in HTML, CHM and HTB (wxWidgets help viewer) formats is provided as well as an installer for Microsoft Windows. Notice that you will still need to compile wxWidgets even when using the installer. Experimentally, we also supply binaries of wxMSW libraries built with several versions of Microsoft Visual C++ compiler for this release. They are available in the "binaries" subdirectory, see the description of the files in the README file there. 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 docs/xserver.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/3.0.0/ 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://ftp.wxwidgets.org/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 2013