wxWidgets 3.1.6 Release Notes ============================= Welcome to the latest development release of wxWidgets, a free and open source cross-platform C++ framework for writing advanced GUI applications using native controls. wxWidgets allows you to write native-looking GUI applications for all the major desktop platforms and also helps with abstracting the differences in the non-GUI aspects between them. It is free for the use in both open source and commercial applications, comes with the full, easy to read and modify, source and extensive documentation and a collection of more than a hundred examples. You can learn more about wxWidgets at: * https://www.wxwidgets.org/ Documentation is available online at: * https://docs.wxwidgets.org/3.1.6/ wxWidgets sources and binaries for the selected platforms are available for download from: * https://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/ or, for a more more permanent but less convenient to use link, from * https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/releases/tag/v3.1.6/ Please see https://docs.wxwidgets.org/3.1.6/overview_install.html for full installation instructions. Changes since 3.1.4 ------------------- In the nine months since the previous release, there have been more than 1600 commits from 70 unique contributors (40 with multiple contributions), so it is impossible to summarize all the changes in this document without making it too long, please see the fuller changelog at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/v3.1.6/docs/changes.txt for more details, but here are some of the most important changes: - New wxWebRequest and related classes provide a simple way to use HTTPS and HTTP/2 from wxWidgets applications using native libraries or libcurl. - Support EGL in wxGLCanvas and Wayland in wxMediaCtrl under Linux. - Many appearance and other fixes for macOS 11. - More improvements to wxGrid UI, API and performance. - wxImage improvements: add alpha support in Paste() and clipboard support. - API additions: wxPersistentComboBox, wxFileName::ResolveLink(), wxFileHistory::SetMenuPathStyle(), wxString::utf8_string(), wxEVT_FULLSCREEN. - Improvements: wxConfig now supports 64-bit integers, wxLog uses millisecond resolution in timestamps, XRC files can be loaded from URLs. - Yet more bug fixes, fixes for API inconsistencies and optimizations, notably in wxDataViewCtrl, wxListCtrl, wxPropertyGrid. Notice that in spite of all the changes, this release remains almost completely compatible with 3.1.4 at the API level, so upgrading to it if you're already using wxWidgets 3 should be straightforward. Changes since 3.0 ----------------- Compared to the stable 3.0.x series, this version brings too many improvements and even more bug fixes to list them all, but here is the maximally condensed summary: - Build system improvements: support for new compilers (up to MSVS 2019, g++ 10) with an even simpler way of using wxWidgets from MSVS, with wxwidgets.props file, and OS versions as well as an entirely new CMake build system. - Support for native dark mode under macOS 10.14 Mojave and later. - New features: HTTPS and HTTP/2 support with wxWebRequest and friends; support for freezing rows/columns in wxGrid; mouse gesture events (GSoC 2017 project); non-integer font sizes and arbitrary font weights in wxFont; fractional pen widths in wxGraphicsContext; arbitrary label windows in wxStaticBox; markup in wxDataViewCtrl items text; better support for high DPI monitors and per-monitor DPI and dynamic DPI changes support under MSW; support for ZIP 64 files; LZMA compression; much improved accessibility support under MSW; new Edge-based wxWebView implementation. - New classes: wxActivityIndicator, wxAddRemoveCtrl, wxAppProgressIndicator, wxNativeWindow, wxPersistentComboBox, wxPowerResourceBlocker, wxSecretStore, wxTempFFile and many new features in the existing classes. - Significant improvements to: wxBusyInfo, wxDataViewCtrl, wxDirDialog, wxGrid, wxNotificationMessage, wxSpinCtrl, wxStaticBox, wxStyledTextCtrl, wxUIActionSimulator. - Latest versions of all bundled 3rd party libraries, including all the security fixed and support for WebKit 2 and GStreamer 1.7 under Unix. - Revamped OpenGL support better suited to modern OpenGL (3.2+) and EGL support and better support for Wayland in wxGTK. - Further C++11 and later support improvements, wxWidgets can be built using C++20 compilers. - A lot of bug fixes, especially in wxGTK3 and wxOSX/Cocoa ports. - New experimental wxQt port. Platforms Supported ------------------- This version of wxWidgets supports the following primary platforms: * Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 10 (32/64 bits). * Most Unix variants using the GTK+ toolkit (version 2.6 or newer) * macOS (10.10 or newer) using Cocoa (32/64 bits) 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 Qt 5 or newer (experimental) All C++ compilers in common use are supported. Licence ------- 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, wxQt or wxMotif (with Lesstif) version of your application, don't forget that it is linked against GTK+, Qt or Lesstif, which are covered by LGPL *without* exception notice and so is bound by its requirements. 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. Reporting Bugs -------------- The wxWidgets bug tracker can be found here: * https://trac.wxwidgets.org/newticket 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 ------------------- If you are looking for community support, you can get it from * Mailing Lists: https://www.wxwidgets.org/support/mailing-lists/ * Discussion Forums: https://forums.wxwidgets.org/ * #wxwidgets IRC Channel: https://www.wxwidgets.org/support/irc/ * Stack Overflow (tag your questions with "wxwidgets"): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wxwidgets Commercial support is also available, please see https://www.wxwidgets.org/support/commercial/ Finally, keep in mind that wxWidgets is an open source project collaboratively developed by its users and your contributions to it are always welcome! Have fun! The wxWidgets Team, April 2021