wxWidgets 3.1.4 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/3.1.4/ 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/v3.1.4/ Changes since 3.1.3 ------------------- In the nine months since the previous release, there have been almost 1700 commits from 74 unique contributors (37 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/v3.1.4/docs/changes.txt for more (but still not all) details, but some of the most important changes are: - wxOSX port now supports the latest macOS 11 on ARM hardware. - wxMSW comes with a new Edge-based wxWebView implementation. - Better, although still not perfect, per-monitor DPI support in wxMSW. - wxGrid was has been significantly improved and is now much user friendlier. - AUI appearance enhancements for non-default GTK themes and macOS dark mode. - wxWidgets may now be built with C++20 compiler. - Improvements to CMake build system. - Allow optionally forbidding dangerous implicit wxString conversions. And, of course, there were many, many bug fixes in all ports, notably including fixing several long-standing problems in wxOSX. Notice that in spite of all the changes, this release remains almost completely compatible with 3.1.3 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: support for mouse gesture events (GSoC 2017 project); fractional pen widths in wxGraphicsContext; arbitrary label windows in wxStaticBox; markup in wxDataViewCtrl items text; better support for high DPI monitors; support for ZIP 64 files; much improved accessibility support under MSW; Support for non-integer font sizes and arbitrary font weights; LZMA compression support (using liblzma). - New classes: wxActivityIndicator, wxAddRemoveCtrl, wxAppProgressIndicator, wxNativeWindow, wxPowerResourceBlocker, wxSecretStore. - And methods: wxDateTime::GetWeekBasedYear(), wxListBox::GetTopItem(), wxProcess::Activate(), wxTextEntry::ForceUpper(), several ones in wxRendererNative, wxStandardPaths::GetUserDir(), wxUIActionSimulator ::Select() and many others. - Significant improvements to: wxBusyInfo, wxDataViewCtrl, wxNotificationMessage, wxStaticBox, wxStyledTextCtrl. - 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+). - Further C++11 support improvements. - 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; see the install.txt file for each platform (following the links from docs/index.htm). 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 are for Unix systems (including macOS) 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. 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.md files in the docs subdirectory appropriate for the platform you use or the "Platform Details" page of the manual, which contains links to the rendered versions of these files. 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, July 2020