-Announcing wxWindows 2.3.3: a cross-platform GUI toolkit
-----------------------------------------------------------------
+July 9, 2012 -- The wxWidgets team is pleased to announce the
+latest 2.9.4 release of wxWidgets library.
-September 16th, 2002 -- the wxWindows team is pleased to
-announce the release of a development snapshot of the mature
-cross-platform C++ application framework.
+wxWidgets 2.9.4 is available at
-The following platforms are supported:
-
-- Windows 95/98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP
-- Unix with GTK+ 1.x and 2.0
-- Unix with X11
-- Unix with Motif/Lesstif
-- VMS with GTK+ 1.x
-- MacOS 8.6, 9.x and 10.x
-- OS/2 (alpha)
-
-To get wxWindows, go to the Download page at:
-
- http://www.wxwindows.org
-
-This is likely to be the last development snapshot in the
-2.3.x series, before the release of the stable 2.4.x series.
-
-*** About wxWindows
-
-wxWindows is a comprehensive open-source, multi-platform C++
-GUI framework, that can be used to build commercial and free
-software. It's used by many organisations all over the world,
-including the company that invented the GUI.
-
-For most ports, wxWindows adopts the native look and feel of
-each platform since it uses the native widget sets. There is also
-a generic widget set, used for the wxX11 port - no other widget set
-is required, giving the potential for embedded use.
-
-An extraordinary range of classes is provided - but don't be put
-off by this because most people find wxWindows easier to learn
-and use than MFC and other frameworks.
-
-As well as comprehensive support for the usual widgets, advanced
-features include: HTML viewing/printing, wxImage class providing
-handlers for eading and writing many image types, resizeable panels
-and dialogs on all platforms, document/view, OpenGL support,
-HTML-based and context-sensitive help, wizards, drag and drop,
-a grid class, ODBC support, threads, sockets, container classes,
-and much more. An 1800-page reference manual is provided in HTML,
-MS HTML Help, WinHelp, wxWindows Help and PDF, and there are over
-70 samples and demos.
-
-If you're an MFC user, you'll find many wxWindows concepts
-reassuringly familiar, while often clearer and more consistent.
-If you're not, you should still find it intuitive from the start.
-
-wxWindows bindings for several other languages are available,
-including Python, Perl, Basic, Lua, JavaScript and Eiffel.
-
-If you're considering wxWindows, do check out some of these links:
-
- http://www.wxwindows.org/feedback.htm ; Comments from users
- http://www.wxwindows.org/screensh.htm ; Screenshots
- http://www.wxwindows.org/users.htm ; A list of some of our
- ; users
-
-Have fun!
-
-Julian Smart and the wxWindows team
-
-=====
-
-A small selection of the comments from the Feedback page:
-
-"wxWindows 2.xx has been an absolute dream; putting together a
-nice interface has been quite easy, and I'm especially pleased
-that I can do most of our development on *nix with confidence
-that only minor issues will have to get cleaned up when we build
-on Windows."
-
-"I use wxWindows as a GUI Toolkit for Python. Its stability,
-flexibility and speed are the base of industrial strength
-cross-platform GUI application design with interpreted languages
-like Python. Porting is child's play. Thanks for this great
-piece of software!"
-
-"Excellent, stable and intuitive API. Very straightforward to
-learn and easy to port Java, X11 and Win32 code to."
-
-"Thanks heaps for the best piece of software I've ever come
-across (wxWindows)."
-
-"I chose wxWindows for a very much Windows-only application
-because of the simplicity of the API compared to MFC and Win32
-GDI programming. Aside from some minor mistakes in the manual
-which confused me for a while, wxWin has been really easy to use
-and increased my productivity immensely compared to using
-another framework."
-
-"wxWindows is a great product. One of its best features, IMHO,
-are all the language bindings. It's very easy to prototype your
-app in wxPython, then convert to a C/C++ app later."
-
-"Porting to wxWindows is easy - I recently ported an MFC project
-at work to wxGTK on Solaris, and changing all the MFC calls to
-wxWindows calls only took a couple of hours for a 2 man-month
-project... I've never had an easier porting experience.
-wxWindows was intentially built to work like MFC to make it easy
-to port, and they most certainly succeeded, with the notable
-exception of OLE support. I ported a several man month project
-in a day or two, and none of it was hard or confusing, it just
-amounted to looking up the equivalent functions in the help. I
-could do the conversion much faster now because I wouldn't have
-to keep glancing at the web page."
-
-"I'd like to take the opportunity and say a big thank you to all
-the wxWin developers and contributors. wxWindows is the best
-piece of software I have been using so far, and I can't believe
-that I haven't discovered it earlier. I never thought that
-cross-platform development could be so easy and simply cool.
-Great stuff :)"
-
-"Just wanted to commend you on wxWindows. As I'm reading the
-code samples (the checklistbox right now), I'm realizing that
-this is so intuitive and so Java-like in some parts of it,
-especially with the way the layout works... Very good work and
-thank you."
-
-"I have used wxWindows in the past very successfully on multiple
-projects, and think it's the bee's knees. Thanks for everything!"
-
-"Well, I'm using wxWindows since 2 days and I'm already in love
-with it :) The sizers saved me from writing a complete layout
-solution myself. Great work! You guys rock!"
-
-"wxWindows is jaw dropping amazing. Community support from the
-mailing list is extraordinary. Are you sure this is free?"
-
-"I love wxWindows. I can program 10 times faster than with MFC,
-and almost everything works the first time. And unlike MFC,
-there are (useful) examples and documentation. Thanks to you
-guys who did all the work to develop this framework. Big kudos."
-
-"ImageLinks now uses the Open Source version of wxWindows for
-all its current GUI development. Doing this ensures that
-everything interfaces cleanly and also makes it easier in the
-long run to add other GUIs along the way because ImageLinks has
-access to all the source code."
+ https://sourceforge.net/downloads/wxwindows/2.9.4/
+and soon will also appear at our FTP mirror at
+
+ ftp://ftp.wxwidgets.org/pub/2.9.4/
+
+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 version of
+Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. You can download them from
+
+ https://sourceforge.net/downloads/wxwindows/2.9.4/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 are a lot of improvements in wxOSX/Cocoa
+port. The most important new feature in this release is experimental
+support for building wxGTK with GTK+ 3 version of the toolkit. Other
+noteworthy additions are:
+
+- Transparent background is now support for wxGTK windows.
+- New style directory selection dialog is now used in wxMSW.
+- Native wxDatePickerCtrl and wxTimePickerCtrl for wxOSX.
+- wxFSInputStream stream class for reading data from wxFileSystem.
+- wxGrid::Render() method allows to print or save wxGrid contents.
+- Strike-through fonts are now supported.
+- Horizontal mouse wheel events are now generated.
+
+
+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 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/2.9.4/changes.txt/docs/changes.txt
+for more details and http://docs.wxwidgets.org/2.9.4/overview_changes_since28.html
+if you are upgrading from wxWidgets 2.8.
+
+
+Note about naming: while 2.9.4 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.