path: root/CHANGELOG.txt

  Release notes for fpGUI
  =======================

v1.0 (2013-04-09)
  - Docview improvements: Bookmark maintenance, keyboard shortcuts,
    image support in INF files, cross link support.
  - Many improvements to the experimental Maximus IDE.
  - More widget themeing improvements.
  - Keyboard shortcut handling improvements.
  - AggPas 2D graphics library merged into fpGUI as a new
    cross-platform graphics backend. This is the first step in
    adding AggPas support, and this is still work in progress, but
    most functionality works already. Also added some 64-bit fixes
    to the AggPas code.
  - Many PDF report engine improvements. Also enhanced the look and
    functionality of the Print Preview dialog.
  - Lots more documentation added. This is an ongoing task.
  - Big improvements to the TextEdit widget, that is used by Maximus
    and the Nanoedit example project.
  - Many improvements to the RichView component and it's supported
    syntax - used by Docview. This widget is now also useable
    in other projects, not just Docview.
  - Improved fpGUI language translations.
  - The UI Designer (forms designer) has also seen many improvements,
    like new widgets added to the palette, more published properties
    added to the Object Inspector window etc.
  - Many, many more bug fixes and improvements. For a full list run:
      git log v1.0...v0.8


v0.8 (2011-12-02)
  - New widget demos and many improvements to existing demos.
  - New application examples
    * Spinning Globe, show some graphics support with zooming.
    * An experimental IDE called Maximus, which supports project
      management, compiler settings management, macro management,
      multi-threading enabled, fast procedure list searching, 
      syntax-highlighting enabled text editor, OS independent 
      file monitor support etc.
  - PDF reporting engine and preview support. Thanks to
    Jean-Marc Levecque for this awesome contribution.
  - Huge improvements and enhancements to the Treeview widget.
    * massive speed improvement
    * improved painting support
    * extended treeview and node method calls
    * state image support (eg: having checkboxes next to nodes)
    widget.
  - Many Docview (fpGUI documentation viewer) improvements
    * Bookmark support
    * Improved annotation support
    * Improved the text rendering and text wrapping
    * Rewrote the font handling which gave a massive 200+% speed
      increase in startup times (depending on the amount of fonts you
      have installed on your system), and reduced memory usage by 50%.
  - Added image support to RichView, the text viewer used by Docview.
  - Two new supported platforms: OpenSolaris and MacOSX (with X11
    support).
  - Global keyboard shortcut support for menu items and actions.
  - fpGUI API documentation has been extended and improved.
  - OS independent DND (drag-n-drop) support has been implemented. This
    supports external application-to-application and internal
    widget-to-widget drag-n-drop.
  - Improved the workings of implementing context sensitive help inside
    your applications.
  - Improved fpGUI project templates for use with Lazarus IDE or MSEide.
  - Included the WIPFC (OpenWatcom IPF Compiler) binaries to allow you
    to compile your own IPF help files into binary INF help files.
  - UI Designer (the visual forms designer for fpGUI) has seen many
    improvements:
    * new components on the component palette.
    * new properties accessible in the Object Inspector
    * improved dialogs for "tab order" and "widget order" changes.
    * code generated can now use spaces or tab characters for
      indentation.
    * improved File menu layout and new options.
  - Improved themes support
  - Experimental MDI (multi-document interface) support
  - Extended the Unicode wrapper functions for the FPC's RTL file
    handing
    functions.
  - New built-in code page conversion functions have been added.
  - Grid widgets have improved scrolling support options.
  - Improved fpGUI language translations.
  - Many, many more bug fixes and improvements. For a full list run:
      git log v0.8...v0.7


v0.7 (2010-08-02)
  - Quite a few more minor bug fixes since v0.7-rc2.
  - Some memory leaks in TfpgListView
  - Added an example Debug Server in examples/apps/debugserver
    - This can be used with FPC's dbugintf unit so you can send
      debug messages. Handy for debugging CGI apps on your server.
  - A new unit fpg_imgutils was added. It contains some handy
    utility functions for images.
  - Implemented disabled images support for all controls that can
    display images.
  - Added a new TfpgMemo Mediator for use with tiOPF based
     applications.
  - Improved quick date selection in TfpgComboCalendar. Users can
    now click the Year or Month to quickly select a different value
    without the need for scrolling through every month.
  - Many more improvements to the "prototype" text editor component
    located in prototypes/textedit/. Soon this will become a
    standard component in fpGUI.
  - Minor improvements to DocView's toolbar.
  - DocView now has a 'File | Open Special' option, which can open
    environment variables pointing to a location where INF files are.
  - Grids now have a smooth scrolling option for horizontal scrolling.
  - A new Input Query dialog was added.
  - Some demos where improved. eg: SplashScreen demo.
  - JPEG image format support was added. Soon all image formats
    supported by FPImage will be included. Unfortunately it did not
    make it into this release.
  - Added a fpGUI project template for when you use fpGUI with MSEide.
  - A new Color Selection dialog was added to fpGUI.
  - fpGUI's UI Designer has a few more components on the component palette.
    eg: TfpgFilenameEdit, TfpgDirectoryEdit, TfpgFontEdit, etc...
  - Some more minor changes to allow compiling fpGUI under MacOSX with X11.


v0.7.rc2  (2010-04-08)
  - Localization of Character Map dialog.
  - Insert from Character Map added to TfpgEdit default popup menu.
  - ModalResults is now a enum type. Improved integration with UI
    Designer.
  - Memo: problems with deleting selected text is now fixed.
  - Improved WinCE support, including reading BMP files.
  - Fixed compilation of all example projects.
  - Extended available properties that can be edited via the Object
    Inspector of the UI Designer.
  - Fixed issues where dialogs are closed via the window border X
    button and not the available buttons in the dialog. Developer
    can define behaviour of X close button.
  - Improved TabSheet handling in UI Designer.
  - Various improvements to TfpgPageControl and TfpgTabSheet. This
    includes new tab positions: Bottom, Left, Right and None.
  - SelectDirectory dialog was not working under Windows.
  - Setting selected directory in SelectDirectory dialog now works.
  - New mouse cursor demo.
  - Improved the ability to customize the HintWindow. HintWindow
    demo was extended to show how this can be done.
  - Improved Visible property handling especially with child
    components. Now only the parent Visible property is changed.
  - tiOPF: correctly disable event handlers in edit mediators.
  - Added a script which generates a fpGUI version number based on
    Git repository information. Later this will be converted to
    a object pascal console application.


v0.7.rc1  (2010-03-04)
  - FPC 2.4.0 compatible.
  - Fully tested on 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Tested on Linux,
    Windows and the *BSD family.
  - Mobile device support is back. Tested on ARM Linux and Windows
    Mobile devices.
  - fpGUI UI Designer has improved a lot and extended it's component
    palette and Object Inspector.
  - Various bug fixes, memory leaks and other enhancements have been
    applied.
  - Units have a more uniform naming style.
  - Classes have a more uniform structure/hierarchy with base classes.
  - Help support has been added to the core framework
  - fpGUI now has it's own help file viewer called DocView.
    Docview includes the following features:
     - document annotation
     - bookmarks
     - browse history
     - exporting articles to plain text or IPF format.
     - full text search (including weighting of results to see how
       relevant the results are)
     - Font and Color customization
     - Concatenation of help files at run-time so a library of help
       files can be viewed simultaneously.
     - Easy integration via the "external tools" feature of IDE's like
       Lazarus or MSEide. This allows for context sensitive help.
     - History of most recently viewed help files.
     - Help file format used is the INF format (IBM's format used it
       OS/2), which is very compact, incredibly fast and supports full
       text search.
  - A lot of new components have been added, including enhancements
    to existing components.
  - Various new dialogs have been added, which include Color Wheel,
    Character Map, Database Login etc.
  - Improved integration with tiOPF project via the Model-GUI-Mediator
    design pattern.
  - Graphical FPCUnit unit test runner.
  - Lots of new language translations for the core fpGUI library.
  - A lot of new example projects demoing various GUI components.


v0.6  (2008-02-17) revision 534
  - Added a new INI Utils unit which introduces ReadOnly ini support
  - Implemented the Model-GUI-Meditor design pattern so fpGUI can be
    used with tiOPF's object persistent framework. This allows any
    fpGUI component to become object-aware. I find this a better
    alternative to DB-aware components.
  - Many improvements to the GUI Designer. New property editors, new
    components, better mouse support, MRU menu etc.
  - 64-bit support is now added
  - Newly supported platforms: FreeBSD and DesktopBSD
  - Unicode text input is now supported under Windows.
  - Started implementing Message Dialogs (with multiple buttons, icons etc).
  - New components:
    * Calendar combobox
    * Gauges (pie, bar, needle, etc.)
    * DB Label example component.
  - Better support for newer desktop environments under Linux.
  - Anti-aliased line drawing support.
  - Line styles (dot, solid, dash...) are now fully supported on all platforms.
  - Implemented the Command design pattern interface. Something like
    Delphi's TAction component.
  - Fixed many memory leaks in CoreLib units.
  - New examples/demos added: Splash Screen, Command Handler, Gauges,
    Anti-aliased line drawing etc..
  - Started working on Message Dialogs.
  - Better clipboard support.
  - Including MANY more improvements and bug fixes. There are to
    many to list. For a detailed listing of the changes use the svn command
    line client as follows:  svn log -r 367:534


v0.5  (2007-09-13)
  - The first release since the rewrite of fpGUI to use a 'windowed'
    multi-handle implementation.
  - Available components in this release:
    * Button with image support
    * Label
    * Bevel (aka Panel)
    * Radio Buttons
    * Check Boxes
    * Track Bar (aka Slider)
    * Page Control (aka Tab Control)
    * List Box
    * Scrollbars
    * Memo (partially implemented)
    * Forms (Windows). Normal, Modal and Popup.
    * Dialogs
          o ShowMessage()
          o Font Selection dialog
          o File Open...
          o File Save As...
    * Text Edit
    * Combo Box (aka Choice List)
    * Grids (aka Tables)
          o Base Grid
          o Custom Grid
          o Draw Grid
          o String Grid
          o File Grid
    * Progress Bar
    * List View
    * Main Menu bar and Popup Menus
    * Treeview
  - Align and Anchor support has been added.
  - Clipboard support (application wide). Global (OS based)
    is in the works.
  - All painting is done via double buffering, so drawing flicker
    is a thing of the past.
  - Better font support. We now have support for Font Aliases. We
    can define a font style (font name, size and attributes) and
    give it a text name. Whenever we want to use that font style,
    we can reference it by the text name.
  - All colors are now defined in RGB order, no matter what platform
    we use.
  - Modal form support (with some minor issues under Windows that
    should be fixed soon).
  - Widgets and Forms now have a single consistent constructor due
    to the base window class that descends from TComponent.
  - Delayed resource allocation. This is very handy under Linux where
    the X Server can be in a remote location (not on the same computer).
    This gives a performance bonus as we need to communicate less with
    the X Server which is inherently slow.
  - Supports a Model-GUI-Mediator (MGM) implementation to work with
    the tiOPF Object Persistent Framework. Business Objects can now
    be saved in a OO fashion. The MGM implementation also makes the
    standard fpGUI components Object-Aware. No need for DB Components.
  - fpGUI now has a Visual Form (GUI) Designer in the example/apps
    directory. Developers can now create forms visually at a much
    faster rate. The designer uses the same source file that contains
    your code - generating the ui code like you would have done
    manually. No external ui files like Lazarus (*.lfm) or Delphi
    (*.dfm). See the readme file in the project directory for more
    details.


v0.4
  - The last version of fpGUI using a single handle (windowless)
    design.

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