ANN: wxWidgets 2.9.5 release

[Vadim Zeitlin]

July 15, 2013 -- The wxWidgets team is pleased to announce the
latest 2.9.5 release of wxWidgets library.

wxWidgets 2.9.5 is available at

https://sourceforge.net/downloads/wxwindows/2.9.5/

and soon will also appear at our FTP mirror at

ftp://ftp.wxwidgets.org/pub/2.9.5/

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 versions of
Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. You can download them from

https://sourceforge.net/downloads/wxwindows/2.9.5/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 were a lot of improvements in wxOSX/Cocoa
port. Some of other noteworthy changes were:

- Introduction of short event names (e.g. wxEVT_BUTTON instead of
wxEVT_COMMAND_BUTTON_SELECTED) to make the code using Bind() for
dynamic event handling easier to both write and read.
- Support for hooking any modal dialogs shown by wxWidgets, which is
especially used for non-interactive testing.
- New wxSimplebook class.
- Many enhancements in wxWebView and related classes.
- Addition of special files support to wxFileName under Unix.



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 wxGTK3 port, including support for Broadway (HTML5) backend.
- 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/2.9.5/changes.txt
for more details and please read the "INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES" section
in its beginning for a brief description of changes if you are
upgrading from wxWidgets 2.8. For more details, please see
http://docs.wxwidgets.org/2.9.5/overview_changes_since28.html


Note about naming: while 2.9.5 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.