Monday, July 19, 2010

2.9.1 Finally Done

The 2.9.1 is finally officially done, all the files are here or at the FTP mirror. Not much to add to the previous posts about 2.9.1, I can only say that for me this is without doubt the best* wxWidgets release to date and it's incredibly more convenient and practical to use for development than 2.8.

Thanks to Stefan for quickly fixing the two important Mac bugs mentioned in the last update. And thanks for Source Forge for making the releases much, much less painful than in the past -- you can now simply scp the files to their file release system instead of passing by the hideous and incredibly slow (at least in the past when I had to use it) web-based file manager. It's a pleasure to see such outbreaks of common sense, even if (or "especially when"?) they come after years of torturing people with their old interface.

And, of course, thanks to everybody else who contributed to this release and the ongoing wxWidgets development. You're too numerous to be listed here but your help is really appreciated and, as hard as it could be to believe, the release would have taken even longer (if it ever happened at all) without it. Thank you!


* Barring some catastrophic bug which we didn't notice, of course...

6 comments:

Francisco Almeida said...

Good news, hopefully you'll find all the feedback helpful!

I am however, sad that the monolithic MinGW (TDM) DLL build still is broken. Something was missed when scintilla was upgraded to 2.x. Could it be due to the makefile generation?

Can something be done about this?

VZ said...

Francisco, is there a bug about this? I really have no idea about this issue, sorry.

Francisco Almeida said...

Yes, I'm afraid it is. I submitted it to wxTrac, but it does not seem to be an evident problem (http://trac.wxwidgets.org/ticket/12136). It only impacts MinGW (as far as I can tell, of GCC 4.4.x or higher). The linking error is more evident when trying to build a monolithic DLL. The STC component also fails to link when making an executable based on the monolithic static library.

stalex said...

You said:
"it's incredibly more convenient and practical to use for development than 2.8"

but why ??
Why will wx2.9.x improve my software development ? A lots of functions have not changed since 2.8.x ... and creating frames, events and controllers is always the same ?

Thanks

VZ said...

Stalex, do you really expect each new version to have a radically different API? I don't think it would be a good idea.

As for things which make 2.9 much easier to use for me there are 2 most important ones: (1) Unicode changes, notably that you don't need to care to translate ASCII to wchar_t all the time nor to write wxT() everywhere if you work with ASCII. And (2) Bind() which makes the code shorter and more clear than equivalent using Connect().

Aron said...

I've been using wxWidgets for years in a production environment and am delighted by its continued improvement. One thing I would really like to see in the 3.0 release is fixed project files for Visual C++ 2010 - like the ones available on http://forums.wxwidgets.org/viewtopic.php?t=27630

Hoping 3.0 is available soon!