wxWidgets 3.0.0 Release Notes
=============================
Welcome to the latest 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
http://www.wxwidgets.org/
and read its documentation online at
http://docs.wxwidgets.org/3.0.0/
wxWidgets sources and binaries for the selected platforms 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.
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 greatly 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 (32/64 bits).
- Most Unix variants using the GTK+ toolkit (version 2.6 or newer)
- Mac OS X (10.5 or newer) using Cocoa (32/64 bits) or Carbon (32 only)
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
-----
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.
We also supply binaries of wxMSW libraries built with several
versions of Microsoft Visual C++ and GNU g++ compiler for this
release. They are available in the "binaries" subdirectory, see
the description of the files in the README file there.
Installation
------------
Unless you have downloaded the binaries for your compiler, you
will need to build wxWidgets 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 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.
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
-------------------
If you are looking for support, you can get it from
- wxForum at http://forums.wxwidgets.org/
- wx-users mailing list (http://www.wxwidgets.org/support/maillst2.htm)
- #wxwidgets IRC channel
- http://stackoverflow.com/ if you tag your question with "wxwidgets"
Have fun!
The wxWidgets Team, November 2013
9b31387508