Development: Todo List

This is a collection of the various things which it would be nice to include in wxWidgets. They may or may not be scheduled or funded. If you're interested in helping with wxWidgets development, one of the small projects below could be a great way to join the team!

New Development

High priority

• Provide a possibility to use individual wxUniv controls from the native ports.

• Give wxFileSystem a better API and further integrate it with wxWidgets (currently only wxHtml uses it but it could be also used by many other classes)

• wxHTML2, using native HTML renderers where available.

• Add image support to wxButton (Jamie Gadd has the patch for wxMSW, with a bit work it should be extended to others ports) merging wxBitmapButton with wxButton, see this thread for more information.

• Implement wxMaskedTextCtrl in C++ (it's already available in wxPython)

Medium priority

• MIME types code needs a cleanup and a GUI interface to allow setting the MIME types and related information from the program itself

• wxReBar control (moveable toolbars, menubars) - see http://www.planet-berlin-it.de/project/wxCoolBar for an already existing implementation

• Avoid calling the wxYield family of functions in internal code. wxYield causes problems in combination with pending events leading to all sorts of strange side-effects.

• Move wxApp::Yield() to wxEventLoop::Yield(), where it logically belongs (see wxDFB port for partial step in this direction)

• add persistent control support: see PersistentControls page for more info

• add wxFont::SetAntiAliasingMode(enum { Default, On, Off }) method which can be implemented easily at least for MSW by using the corresponding LOGFONT::lfQuality values.

Low priority

• Write wxConfig implementation using XML as backend:
  • portable wxXMLConfig for all platforms (there is a version doing it here and here but it duplicates too much of wxFileConfig code unfortunately)
  • wxApplePrefConfig for working with .pref files on Mac OS X

• wxStaticBox: Hide the platform problems (GTK: 'children' must be siblings) in encapsulation in order to avoid problems on ports where the hierarchy must be 'correct'.

• Standard menu and toolbar customization dialogs

• Extend wxLocale to return more information, e.g. currency formatting, list separator, ...

• Improve wxSpinCtrl to allow showing something else than just its value in the text field. This should be done by implementing support for wxSpinCtrlFormatter class which would have Format() and Parse() virtual methods which could be implemented by a user-defined class which the user coode would associate with the control and which would mediate the conversion between the value and the text field contents.

• Fix alpha handling in wxIconBundle under MSW (see this thread)

Everything else

Most of the following items need to be discussed before being implemented.

• Synchronisation API between mobile and desktop.
• Extend and unify drag and drop handling (e.g. we need to specify multiple drop targets that can handle multiple formats).
• Serial and parallel port support.
• Modem and telephony support.
• Improve accessibility support.
• wxDC Support for point to char-position with text rendering

Improvements to the existing code

This page lists many of the classes/methods which are not implemented under all platforms. In addition, our bug tracker page has an almost unlimited supply of bugs to fix.

Documentation

• The possibility of moving doc into header files with tool support, or translation to XML with support from scripts (comparison of headers and documentation).
• Detailed review of doc accuracy.
• wxDC: Precise definition of default/initial state.
• wxDC: Pixelwise definition of operations (e.g. last point of a line not drawn).
• Events: for all controls state clearly when calling a member function results in an event being generated and when it doesn't (possibly updating also the 'Events generated by the user vs programmatically generated events' paragraph of the 'Event handling overview' with the list of the functions which break that rule).
• Coordinates: state clearly which type of coordinates are returned by the various Get*Point() or similar functions - often they are client coordinates but not always
• Document all wxUSE_XXX settings (it would be also nice to centralize their definitions in a single file instead of having them in several different setup.h)
  See patch 1755127 "Add wxUSE Doc as tex file" as partial solution.
• Update the coding standards guide

Infrastructure

• Set up [buildbot] or similar system for continuous build tests
• Use SourceForge compile farm (or other facilities) to automatically spin at least some of the releases using a specification of the type of release, tag to use, etc.
• Make building Debian packages less painful, in particular try to make it possible to build them in the source tree instead of current roundabout way; automate building of both ANSI and Unicode packages (the former doesn't work with dpkg-buildpackage as there is no way to pass WX_UNICODE=0 to debian/rules when using it).