Wednesday, December 31, 2014

A year in wx

2014 hasn't been the most exciting year for wxWidgets -- among the recent years this honour certainly belongs to 2013, which finally saw the release of the long, long awaited 3.0 release. However quite a few things still happened during it.

First of all, thanks to Bryan Petty, we now have a new shiny web site which not only looks much better, but is also simpler to update and to contribute to.  And it was duly updated more often, in particular to announce two new releases (3.0.1 and 3.0.2) last year, which is two more than we typically make per year.

Second, after a two year hiatus, wxWidgets was part of Google Summer of Code again this year and we had 6 students working on several interesting projects, admittedly with various degrees of success. But work done by Alexandru Pana on Direct2D support, by Chaobin Zhang on new Windows Vista/7 taskbar features, Sun Boxiang on wxUniv/X11 and Mariano Reingart on wxQt port was already merged into the trunk and we hope to merge Haojian Wu's work on Chromium backend for wxWebView before the next release.

Third, in 2014 we welcomed a new member to wxTeam: Artur Wieczorek has started by submitting many important improvements to wxMSW and then also volunteered to become the maintainer of wxPropertyGrid control and has since improved it as well. Thank you Artur!

Other than that, life continued as normal in 2014 with 1678 commits in master and 375 bugs fixed (compared to 1471 and 332 in the previous year).

What are we looking towards in 2015? Definitely a 3.1.0 release and almost certainly a 3.0.3 one. With luck, 3.1.0 will include a new and reworked AUI version. On infrastructure level, after upgrading the web site, the next long-awaited change is officially migrating to git from svn. Finally, we hope for as many contributions from the community in the next year as in the last one, thanks to all (too numerous to list here, sorry!) who submitted patches or sent us bug reports and please continue to do it!

Thank you and happy New Year!