Announcing ----------

The 2.8.6.0 release of wxPython is now available for download at http://wxpython.org/download.php. This release is mostly about fixing a number of bugs and inconsistencies in wxWidgets and wxPython.

Source code is available, as well as binaries for Python 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5, for Windows and Mac, as well some pacakges for various Linux distributions. A summary of changes is listed below and also at http://wxpython.org/recentchanges.php.

What is wxPython? -----------------

wxPython is a GUI toolkit for the Python programming language. It allows Python programmers to create programs with a robust, highly functional graphical user interface, simply and easily. It is implemented as a Python extension module that wraps the GUI components of the popular wxWidgets cross platform library, which is written in C++.

wxPython is a cross-platform toolkit. This means that the same program will usually run on multiple platforms without modifications. Currently supported platforms are 32-bit Microsoft Windows, most Linux or other Unix-like systems using GTK2, and Mac OS X 10.3+, in most cases the native widgets are used on each platform to provide a 100% native look and feel for the application.

Changes in 2.8.6.0 ------------------

This release is mostly about fixing a number of bugs and inconsistencies in wxWidgets and wxPython. In other words, there have been a whole lot more changes than what is listed here, but they are not new features or API visible changes, which is what are usually listed in this file.

Some Menu APIs added to make things more consistent. Added wx.MenuBar.SetMenuLabel, wx.MenuBar.GetMenuLabel, wx.MenuBar.GetMenuLabelText, wx.Menu.GetLabelText, wx.MenuItem.SetItemLabel, wx.MenuItem.GetItemLabel, wx.MenuItem.GetItemLabelText, wx.MenuItem.GetLabelText. The Get...Label functions get the raw label with mnemonics and accelerators, and the Get...LabelText functions get the text only, without mnemonics/accelerators.

Added wx.BORDER_THEME style. This style will attempt to use a theme specific style, if the current platform and environment is themeable and has a specific theme style. For example, you could use this on Windows XP on a custom control to give it a themed border style that looks like what is used by default on the native wx.TextCtrl or wx.ListBox. Since there were not any more available bits for border styles, this style replaces wx.BORDER_DOUBLE.