July 15, 2013 -- The wxWidgets team is pleased to announce the latest 2.9.5 release of wxWidgets library. wxWidgets 2.9.5 is available at https://sourceforge.net/downloads/wxwindows/2.9.5/ and soon will also appear at our FTP mirror at ftp://ftp.wxwidgets.org/pub/2.9.5/ Please choose the archive format suitable for your platform, i.e. 7z or ZIP for Windows platforms and tar.bz2 for the Unix systems including OS X (all archives contain sources for all wxWidgets ports but they use different line endings) and follow the instructions in readme.txt file for installing it. Notice that if you decide to use the Windows installer (.exe file) you still need to build wxWidgets as only sources, not binaries, are installed. However, for the first time ever, we also experimentally provide the pre-built versions of wxMSW libraries built with several versions of Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. You can download them from https://sourceforge.net/downloads/wxwindows/2.9.5/binaries/ Please see the README file there for the descriptions of the individual files. This release mostly focuses on bug fixes in preparation for 3.0 release, in particular there were a lot of improvements in wxOSX/Cocoa port. Some of other noteworthy changes were: - Introduction of short event names (e.g. wxEVT_BUTTON instead of wxEVT_COMMAND_BUTTON_SELECTED) to make the code using Bind() for dynamic event handling easier to both write and read. - Support for hooking any modal dialogs shown by wxWidgets, which is especially used for non-interactive testing. - New wxSimplebook class. - Many enhancements in wxWebView and related classes. - Addition of special files support to wxFileName under Unix. The list of of changes since the 2.8 series is much too long to be listed here but the most important ones are: - Completely overhauled Unicode support which is much easier to use. - New Cocoa-based wxOSX port for Mac OS X for both 32 and 64 bits. - New wxGTK3 port, including support for Broadway (HTML5) backend. - New property grid and ribbon libraries are now included in wxWidgets. - Better interoperability with standard library classes. - Totally revised and more readable manual. - Improved debugging support. Please see the changes.txt file in the "docs" subdirectory of wxWidgets distribution or also available online at https://sourceforge.net/projects/wxwindows/files/2.9.5/changes.txt for more details and please read the "INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES" section in its beginning for a brief description of changes if you are upgrading from wxWidgets 2.8. For more details, please see http://docs.wxwidgets.org/2.9.5/overview_changes_since28.html Note about naming: while 2.9.5 is called a "development" release, this only means that API is not guaranteed to remain unchanged in the subsequent 2.9.x releases (although it is very unlikely to change in incompatible ways at this stage), unlike in the stable 2.8.x branch where source and binary compatibility is always preserved between the different micro releases. We believe the current version is stable and suitable for use in production environment and recommend using it for any new projects using wxWidgets. We are especially looking forward to your feedback about the changes in this release compared to 2.8 version if you're upgrading. Please let us know about any regressions (http://trac.wxwidgets.org/newticket) so that we could fix them in the upcoming 3.0. Thanks in advance! Enjoy! Vadim Zeitlin, on behalf of wxWidgets development team.