June News

Here is a brief summary of changes in wxWidgets during the past month. Once again, we (and I in particular) didn't do time to do as many things as we'd like to but less is better than nothing. And, in case of the most important new feature added, later is hopefully better than nothing as I seem to remember requests for it at least 10 years ago -- and now, finally, we do finally have ... drums roll, please ... support for images in wxButton:







(the images, and hence button sizes, are different in the screenshots above because the standard wxART_INFORMATION icon is used which is platform-dependent).

Another important even if somewhat technical change was the harmonization of handling of different background styles under all (major) platforms, as discussed here. As a side effect, this allows background bitmaps in wxHtmlWindow to work again in wxOSX/Carbon.

Other miscellaneous changes:

• Some wxFont convenient methods such as Bold(), Larger(), Smaller() and non-const versions MakeBold(), MakeLarger(), MakeSmaller() were added: see "Similar fonts creation" section in wxFont documentation


• There were several additions to XRC:


• wxFileCtrl handler was added (thanks to Kinaou Hervé)


• wxEditableListBox handler was added too


• All existing window handlers gained support for ownfg, ownbg and ownfont tags corresponding to the appropriate wxWindow methods
  


• wxDirCtrl gained support for multiple selections (thanks to Steve Lamerton)


• wxStandardPaths behaviour under Windows is now more flexible, see its new IgnoreAppSubDir() method.


• wxVariant was improved to support wxLongLong.

Speaking of wxVariant, Jaakko is currently working on the new, better, safer and more efficient replacement for it called wxAny. Any feedback about it would be very appreciated as we'd really like to make a class we wouldn't be later ashamed of (which is unfortunately a feeling I often have about wxVariant).

Finally, the usual statistics: there were 418 commits to the repository, 95 tickets were created or reopened and 70 tickets were fixed (hmm, I wonder if the label "progress" is this still applicable?).