Autumnal Tidings

I let slip the October post about the changes in the previous month so let me make this one, about combined changes in September and October, on time to try to compensate for it.

Many things have happened during these two months but the most important one was arguably the official 2.9.0 release. It's just the first release in 2.9 series and so many things will change (and already have changed since then) but it's still significant as it's our first non bug-fix release since 2.8.0 almost 3 years ago and the first one containing Unicode-related changes as described here, and, in much more details, in the updated Unicode overview in the manual (make sure to read about the changes since 2.8 if you're upgrading). Now you can easily download it and try it out if the idea of using an svn snapshot makes you nervous. Please do let us know about any problems you encounter when porting the existing code working -- it's not too late to do something to make it easier to upgrade to 3.0 but we need to know about the problems in order to fix them!

The rest of the changes were the usual mix of bug fixes (many) and feature improvements (a few). One of them stands out though: the long spoken, discussed, argued and even blogged about unification of the debug and release builds was implemented soon after 2.9.0 release. As with the Unicode changes, we're confident that it's for the better but it is also quite possible that these changes have introduced some problems in the existing projects/makefiles. And again, if you let us know about them, we'd do our best to fix them before the final 3.0 release.

As for the new features:

• 2 of the 3 GSoC branches have been merged into the trunk so now wxRibbonBar and related classes as well as wxFileSystemWatcher are available in it.
  
• New wxAny class by Jaakko Salli was added. This is a modern, more efficient and safer replacement for wxVariant and the name was chosen because of the similarity to boost::any. It is not used by wxWidgets itself yet but we hope to provide a bridge between it and wxVariant in the future and start using the new class in the API once all the problems with it are ironed out.
  
• wxInfoBar GUI control was added. Instead of describing it, it is probably enough to show how it looks: there are two test bars in the dialogs sample now which can be shown or hidden using the menu commands but I'll spare you YouTube videos showing the effect and will just paste in three screenshots:
  ,
  
  (this is the native GTK+ version available with GTK+ 2.18 and later only, with earlier GTK+ it would looks similarly to the other platforms, notably it would show icons and position the buttons horizontally -- I have no idea why does the native implementation stack them vertically which looks rather ugly IMO) and
  
  
• Many improvements in wxOSX/Cocoa port. Among cosmetic (but nice) things was the addition of ShowWithEffect() implementation, among less visible ones the addition of more conversions from various NSTypes to wx equivalents which makes developing wxOSX itself simpler. There were also improvements for iPhone (notably OpenGL-related ones) and fixes for 10.6. On a personal note, I started using Cocoa port instead of the Carbon for all new Mac development as I believe that it's in a good enough shape to be used now and prefer to fix any bugs in Cocoa code which will be used in the future and not in Carbon port which won't.
• As usual, wxDataViewCtrl and related classes also received several bug fixed and improvements.
  

As usual, I won't describe the bug fixes in details but will just say that many of them were fixed both in the trunk and 2.8 branch so we'd really appreciate more testing of the current 2.8 branch in svn as the problem with fixing so many bugs in the stable branch is that this might inadvertently break something else and it would be great to find and fix it before 2.8.11 release rather than after it.

I will omit the statistics section this time as there doesn't seem to be much point, it doesn't change much from month to month, let me know if anybody was interested in it.

Well, that's all for now -- better brief than late.