wxWidgets 2.8.12 --------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to wxWidgets, a sophisticated cross-platform C++ framework for writing advanced GUI applications using native controls where possible. In addition to common and advanced GUI facilities such as frames, scrolling windows, toolbars, tree controls, icons, device contexts, printing, splitter windows and so on, there are wrappers for common file operations, and facilities for writing TCP/IP applications, thread handling, and more. Where certain features are not available on a platform, such as MDI and tree controls on Unix, they are emulated. A detailed 2000-page reference manual is supplied in HTML, PDF and Windows Help form: see the docs hierarchy. For a quick start, point your Web browser at docs/html/index.htm for a list of important documents and samples. Changes in this release ----------------------- Please see changes.txt and "Changes since 2.6" in the manual for details. Platforms supported ------------------- wxWidgets currently supports the following platforms: - Windows 95/98/ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, Pocket PC/Mobile, Smartphone - Most Unix variants with GTK+ 1 and GTK+ 2 - Most Unix variants with X11 (beta) - Most Unix variants with Motif/Lesstif - MacOS 9.x and 10.x using Carbon (10.3 and above preferred) - MacOS 10.x using Cocoa (beta) - OS/2 (beta) Most popular C++ compilers are supported; see the install.txt file for each platform (available via docs/html/index.htm) for details. See also http://www.wxwidgets.org/platform.htm. Note that 2.6 series were the last to fully support GTK+ 1.2, and Mac OS 9/Mac OS 10.2 and below. wxWidgets 2.7 and above focuses on GTK+ 2 and Mac OS 10.3 and above and compatibility with earlier systems is not guaranteed any more. Files ----- The distribution is available in archive formats appropriate to the target system. See the download pages for details. Installation ------------ wxWidgets needs to be compiled before you can test out the samples or write your own applications. For installation information, please see the install.txt file in the individual directories: docs/msw docs/gtk docs/motif docs/mac docs/cocoa docs/x11 docs/mgl docs/os2 docs/palmos Licence information ------------------- For licensing information, please see the files: docs/preamble.txt docs/licence.txt docs/licendoc.txt docs/gpl.txt docs/lgpl.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. Under Linux systems your app is probably linked against LGPL glibc as well. Please read carefully LGPL, section 6. which describes conditions for distribution of closed source applications linked against LGPL library. Basically you should link dynamically and include source code of LGPL libraries with your product (unless it is already present in user's system - like glibc usually is). If compiled with --enable-odbc (Unix only), wxWidgets library will contain iODBC library which is covered by LGPL. 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 ------------- See docs/html/index.htm for an HTML index of the major documents. See docs/changes.txt for a summary of changes to wxWidgets. See docs/tech for an archive of technical notes. 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. The Windows HTML Help files are located in docs/htmlhelp. The Windows Help files are located in docs/winhelp. The PDF help files are located in docs/pdf. The HTB (wxWidgets HTML Help) files are located in docs/htb. Further information ------------------- The wxWidgets Web site is located at: http://www.wxwidgets.org The main wxWidgets ftp site is at: ftp://biolpc22.york.ac.uk/pub Have fun! The wxWidgets Team, March 2011