wxWidgets 2.8.8---------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to wxWidgets, a sophisticated cross-platform C++framework for writing advanced GUI applications usingnative controls where possible.

In addition to common and advanced GUI facilities such asframes, scrolling windows, toolbars, tree controls, icons,device contexts, printing, splitter windows and so on, there arewrappers for common file operations, and facilities for writingTCP/IP applications, thread handling, and more. Where certainfeatures are not available on a platform, such as MDI and treecontrols on Unix, they are emulated.

A detailed 2000-page reference manual is supplied in HTML, PDFand Windows Help form: see the docs hierarchy.

For a quick start, point your Web browser at docs/html/index.htmfor a list of important documents and samples.

Changes in this release-----------------------

Please see changes.txt and "Changes since 2.6" in the manualfor details.

Platforms supported-------------------

wxWidgets currently supports the following platforms:

- Windows 95/98/ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Pocket PC/Mobile, Smartphone- Most Unix variants with GTK+ 1 and GTK+ 2- Most Unix variants with X11 (beta)- Most Unix variants with Motif/Lesstif- MacOS 9.x and 10.x using Carbon (10.3 and above preferred)- MacOS 10.x using Cocoa (beta)- OS/2 (beta)- PalmOS (alpha)

Most popular C++ compilers are supported; see the install.txtfile for each platform (available via docs/html/index.htm) for details.See also http://www.wxwidgets.org/platform.htm.

Note that 2.6 series were the last to fully support GTK+ 1.2, and Mac OS9/Mac OS 10.2 and below. wxWidgets 2.7 and above focuses on GTK+ 2 and Mac OS10.3 and above and compatibility with earlier systems is not guaranteed anymore.

Files-----

The distribution is available in archive formats appropriate to thetarget system. See the download pages for details.

Installation------------

wxWidgets needs to be compiled before you can test out the samples

or write your own applications. For installation information, pleasesee the install.txt file in the individual directories:

docs/msw docs/gtk docs/motif docs/mac docs/cocoa docs/x11 docs/mgl docs/os2 docs/palmos

Licence information-------------------

For licensing information, please see the files:

docs/preamble.txt docs/licence.txt docs/licendoc.txt docs/gpl.txt docs/lgpl.txt

Although this may seem complex, it is there to allow authors ofproprietary/commercial applications to use wxWidgets in additionto those writing GPL'ed applications. In summary, the licence isLGPL plus a clause allowing unrestricted distribution ofapplication binaries. To answer a FAQ, you don't have todistribute any source if you wish to write commercialapplications using wxWidgets.

However, if you distribute wxGTK or wxMotif (with Lesstif)version of your application, don't forget that it is linkedagainst GTK+ (or Lesstif) which is covered by LGPL *without*exception notice. Under Linux systems your app is probably linkedagainst LGPL glibc as well. Please read carefully LGPL, section6. which describes conditions for distribution of closed sourceapplications linked against LGPL library. Basically you shouldlink dynamically and include source code of LGPL libraries withyour product (unless it is already present in user's system -like glibc usually is). If compiled with --enable-odbc (Unixonly), wxWidgets library will contain iODBC library which iscovered by LGPL.

If you use TIFF image handler, please see src/tiff/COPYRIGHTfor libtiff licence details.

If you use JPEG image handler, documentation for your programshould contain following sentence: "This software is based inpart on the work of the Independent JPEG Group". Seesrc/jpeg/README for details.

If you use wxRegEx class on a system without native regularexpressions support (i.e. MS Windows), see src/regex/COPYRIGHTfile for Henry Spencer's regular expression library copyright.

If you use wxXML classes or XRC, see src/expat/COPYING for licence details.

Documentation

-------------

See docs/html/index.htm for an HTML index of the major documents.

See docs/changes.txt for a summary of changes to wxWidgets.

See docs/tech for an archive of technical notes.

The wxWidgets bug tracker can be browsed at:

http://trac.wxwidgets.org/report

Please use the search function of our Trac installation to findany possibly relevant bugs before reporting new ones. Also pleasenotice that often trying to correct the bug yourself is thequickest way to fix it. Even if you fail to do it, you maydiscover valuable information allowing us to fix it while doingit. We also give much higher priority to bug reports with patchesfixing the problems so this ensures that your report will beaddressed sooner.

The Windows HTML Help files are located in docs/htmlhelp.The Windows Help files are located in docs/winhelp.The PDF help files are located in docs/pdf.The HTB (wxWidgets HTML Help) files are located in docs/htb.

Further information-------------------

The wxWidgets Web site is located at:

http://www.wxwidgets.org

The main wxWidgets ftp site is at:

ftp://biolpc22.york.ac.uk/pub

A wxWidgets CD-ROM with the latest distribution plus an HTMLfront-end and hundreds of MB of compilers, utilities and othermaterial may be ordered from the CD-ROM page: see the wxWidgetsweb site.

Have fun!

The wxWidgets Team, June 2008