GSoC 2014 summary: wxX11/Univ improvement project

The work of Sun Boxiang on improving wxUniv and notably wxX11 port has been merged into the trunk. This was mostly a bug fixing project and as the result of, many more unit tests now pass in wxX11 test suite than before, we're down to "only" 16 failures in 539 tests compared to 80 out of 308 before the project beginning. One new feature also implemented during this project is the new implementation of wxClipboard for X11. See Sun's summary of his work for more details.

Unfortunately there still remains quite a bit of work to be done before wxUniv can really be considered to be ready for general use, but at least know we know better what is missing or broken. In wxX11, there is some major work to be done on event loop code refactoring, to allow reusing the same logic as for the other Unix ports. We should probably also switch to using Cairo instead of the old style X11 drawing functions. And at wxUniv level, we really need a better theme with nicer appearance.

Unfortunately we, the current wxWidgets developers, just don't have any possibility to work on it, so there is no time frame for any of the above, but any contributions from people interested in using wxUniv (e.g. for writing applications with a particular appearance using a custom theme) would be very welcome!

GSoC 2014 summary: Windows task bar API project

This is the first in a series of posts about wxWidgets GSoC 2014 projects and it is about Chaobin Zhang's work on wrapping Windows taskbar API for the use in wxWidgets. The project was a success and I'd like to congratulate Chaobin and thank him and Bryan Petty, who was the mentor on this project, for their work!

The new API additions and things they allow to do are described in more details in Chaobin's own post here, please read it for more information, but, in short, almost all taskbar features are now accessible via wxWidgets API.

Of course, they still remain unportable and Windows-only and while it's better to provide access to them than not do it at all, the main goal of wxWidgets is to facilitate writing portable applications and so the next target is to build a higher level API which would be available elsewhere. We have made a start with wxAppProgressIndicator and wxGA_PROGRESS style for wxGauge using it, but this is still not implemented for any other platform yet. Any contributions implementing this (simple) class in terms of NSProgress under OS X or ideas about how it could be implemented under Linux would be very welcome.