wxWidgets Wish List

Older Stuff

Here'e the first stab at the wish list. In this state I am only collecting anecdotal complaints. Eventually each of these complaints needs to get much more specific so that work can be done to fix it.

1. flicker avoidance -- john's SimpleCanvas needs some way to draw flicker free on all platforms
   • off screen drawing was the first idea, but it turns out, due to how widgets get their DCs, it is impossible to have the canvas tell any widgets it contains that they should draw themselves into the off screen buffer.
2. alpha -- a modern-cool UI must support transparency
   • some work is in the 2.5 branch, Robin is unsure of the status
   • Some work in AOL patch.
   • In 2.5 drawing of bitmaps with an alpha channel is functional for wxMSW and wxMac, but not wxGTK. Additionally, wxImage has support for storing Alpha data, and there is raw data access to wxBitmap data, although that hasn't been put into wxPyhton yet. There has been no work yet that I know of for low-level Alpha drawing with pens and brushes. --Robin
   • GTK supports alpha blending with background in single window only. We'll see if we can live with that. In any case, it would require changes in X etc. to go beyond it.
3. overlapping widget problem - when widgets overlap, they stomp on each other as they draw
   • initial case of this problem fixed in 2.5
   • overlapping buttons fixed in AOL patch
   • overlapping controls cause indefinite update on Win32 with native double-buffering
4. Mac startup time
   • prebinding is the solution, but so far no one has gotten this to work
   • static linking of wxPython might also work, again no one has done this
   • http://wiki.osafoundation.org/twiki/bin/view/Jungle/ChandlerPerformance
   • Startup time seems better on 2.5 and Panther, even without the hacks detailed in that link. --Robin
5. known data from wxPython Jungle.Wiki - wxPythonOSX_20Issues
6. AOL changes to wxWidgets 2.3 folded back into the tip
   • AOL willing to contribute, but process for doing so has been broken. Latest AOL patch & comments is at: ftp://ftp.newaol.com/ac/giveback/n09/wxwin/
7. We failed to get the AOL wish list, though we asked for it
8. High quality HTML widget, using native support where provided
   • Given the current status of wxMozilla work on this task could start moving forward at any time, assuming people are available to work on it. The concept that has been tossed around in the past is to have a "wxHTML 2" that provides a common API and then underneath uses wxMozilla, IE via ActiveX or wxHtmlWindow depending on what is available. --Robin
9. High quality rich text editor capable of supporting rich e-mail
   • I think Stefan has said that he has some code that could be the starting point for a general rich text editor. Is that still the case? Other alternatives are to start from scratch or continue to enhance the wxTextAttr support in the current wxTextCtrl, but personally I think that wxTextCtrl is already too overloaded and that it would be better to leave it to be for the simple unstyled text entry and have some other class that is engineered for and has an easy API for rich text. --Robin
10. Pain-free symbolic debugger support on all platforms.
    • More details please --Robin
11. On Win32 use MSVC project files
    • wxWidgets can be built with project files already. wxPython uses the standard (but somewhat sucky) distutils to do the build. We can probably generate project files for building wxPython too, but the install step would probably be better if left with distutils. --Robin
12. A build system where clean works and where you don't have to do a clean when doing normal development.
    • Used to work, now we have a bug for it: http://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1107
13. Good graphical GUI construction tools.
    • Now that we are on CPIA architecture and build the GUIs mostly ourselves the need for other tools is not so great anymore. Where tradinitional GUI builders can still be used are dialogs. It also seems like the tools have evolved quite a bit since we wrote this wish item. It seems like we can live with what we have now.
14. Build on MacOS X should work with latest compiler, gcc 3.3
    • Both 2.5 and the current 2.4 branch in CVS will build with gcc 3.3 on Panther. I think there are still the problems with using the newest devtools on Jaguar.
15. wxWave should work on Linux for platform-independent sound playing
    • Linux has sync & async sound since Feb 1, 2004.
    • Apparently there is a bug on Mac and the sound only plays synchronously - it is being worked on
16. live resize on wxMac
    • Already done in 2.5. --Robin

Update -- Post wxWidgets

Here's a dump of a wxWidgets wish list, taken from my notes of the wxWidgets/OSAF meeting.

WxWidgets^? wish list"> A WxWidgets wish list

Based on discussions in the wxWidgets / OSAF meeting, here is the wxWidgets TODO wish list:

• pushing the component model into the c++ part of wxwindows
• wxhtml2 - using platform native html renderer
• accessibility
  • We can live without for now
  • AOL working on this, but...
• docking toolbars etc
  • We can live without for now
• gtk2 port - not using as much native as possible
• more use of native widgets on mac too
• rich edit functionality - wxTextControl
• printing doesn't work well
• network code - need to kill or fix
• threading issues - threads on mac should use posix threads
  • Patch here: http://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1171
• native tree list controls on all platforms
• combined tree list control to replace virtual list control which would contain an infinite number of items
• exception support - no way to deal with this yet, this is a hole
  • exceptions cause huge memory leaks
  • goal is to allow use of exceptions
  • We can probably live with the way things are for now
• no error handling
  • esp. out of memory
  • We can probably live with the way things are for now
• large outstanding and unprocessed bug list on sourceforge
• alpha
  • no solution for alpha on x11 based machines
  • alpha drawing pens & brushes not supported, on the wishlist
    • Can probably live without for now
• live resize on the Mac is not supported
• mac widgets which draw outside their boundries - changes to sizers to handle fancy mac shadowing is planned
• startup time reduction, esp. on mac

• Drawer on MacOS X (the sidebar-like thing that slides out in Mail.app and other newish Apple programs)
  • Screenshot
  • Jason Bagley working on this, see discussion on wx-dev.
  • Patch at SF now from Jason, look into wxWidgets project, patch # 908812. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=908812&group_id=102704&atid=632578