GNUstep Gui Release Notes $Revision$ $Date$ 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Gui Release Notes

The release notes include descriptions of API changes, behavior changes and other information that might help developers and users migrate to using a newer version of the library.

0.28.0

This version adds support for modern XIB files and many new classes. Plus the usual bunch of bug fixes.

XIB Support loading XIB5 files. key-value binding Improve Key Value Binding for NSArrayController and add more bindings. multi-monitor support Better support for multi monitor usage and other improvement in the backend integration. new classes NSFontCollection, NSColorSampler, NSSpeechRecognizer, NSAppearance, NSPDFInfo, NSPICTImageRep, NSCIImageRep, NSPDFImageRep, NSPDFPanel, NSDataAsset, NSDatePicker, NSDatePickerCell, NSPredicateEditor, NSPredicateEditorRowTemplate, NSRuleEditor, NSGestureRecognizer, NSButtonTouchBarItem, NSCandidateListTouchBarItem, NSClickGestureRecognizer, NSColorPickerTouchBarItem, NSCustomTouchBarItem, NSGroupTouchBarItem, NSMagnificationGestureRecognizer, NSPanGestureRecognizer, NSPickerTouchBarItem, NSPopoverTouchBarItem, NSPressGestureRecognizer, NSRotationGestureRecognizer, NSSharingServicePickerTouchBarItem, NSSliderTouchBarItem, NSStepperTouchBarItem, NSTouchBarItem, NSTouchBar, NSTouch, NSDockTile formats Implement NSEPSImageRep. Marked GSImageMagickImageRep public. PICT. Better encoding handling in RTF files. theming and drawing Increase small font size to 10. New cursor and stepper images. Various improvements.Lowered NSFloatingWindowLevel by one to distinguish floating panels from menus. NSFileWrapper move Move NSFileWrapper to Foundation. platform compatibility Fixed build on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Improvements to WindowMaker compatibility (e.g. WMFHideApplication support). command line arguments With command line argument -autolaunch YES, do not activate the application when -activateIgnoringOtherApps: is invoked.
0.27.0

This version includes numerous bugfixes, compatibility improvements and other changes accumulated over the last year. It also enables work to be done on integrating NSViews with a Core Animation renderer.

NSApplication Make targetForAction safer. NSMenu Speed up menu updates. Tools/speech Clean up speech tool compilation and switch to newer interface. printing Fix bug in CUPS subclassing introduced in last release. typesetting Minor improvments to typesetting. NSKeyValueBinding Add NSIsControllerMarker. NSSegmentedCell Fix tracking on segmented cell. NSSliderCell Bring slider cell closer to Cocoa implementation. NSView Add ivar for Core Animation in NSView. printing Improve border calculation on printing. NSApplication Lazy load app icon. NSWorkspace Better detection of removable volumes. translations Polish translations. translations Japanese translations. other Lots of bug fixes.
0.26.2

This version is a small, but important bugfix release.

printing Fix allocation of the CUPS printing classes. installation Fix the configure script.
0.26.1

This version is released to conincide with version 1.25.1 of gnustep-base, which contains changes required for this version of gnustep-gui and gnustep-back.

It includes an important workaround for users of GNUstep Objective-C Runtime (libobjc2) and non-fragile ABI to avoid a bug in interaction between the clang compiler and the runtime when non-fragile ABI is in use. Specifically, Clang and the runtime may disagree on what is the offset of an ivar in a class's RAM. This manifested in a crash at application startup due to misalignment of _gcontext inside NSThread. See the mailing list discussion for more information.

It also contains the following changes:

tests Cleanup of warnings. tests Fix text system deallocation test. printing Undefine __BLOCKS__ before including cups.h, as some versions of the header expect that libdispatch is present and used if __BLOCKS__ is defined. graphics context Workaround for Clang+libobjc2+nonfragile ABI issue.
0.26.0

Bumped due to binary incompatibilities between 0.25.0 and 0.25.1. Also including numerous compatibility improvements from the Summer of Code project, and a wide variety of other fixes. Fixes the use of cupsGetPPD() in the printing system.

printing Add an include to get deprecated function cupsGetPPD() on newer CUPS systems. chore Bump required base version. tiff Support for writing resolution. jpeg Save resolution information if it is different from 72 dpi. save panel Fix return type of sorting function. events Add some newer Cocoa enums and one method with dummy implementation. speech synthesis NSSpeechSynthesizerDelegate is now a @protocol on runtimes that support it. pasteboard New type identifiers. translations Some work on Polish, Russian and German translations cell Improvements to mouse tracking logic on NSCell. image If an unknown named image is unarchived with a coder or keyed coder, keep the name. screen Add backingScaleFactor and return 1.0. window Return 1.0 from -backingScaleFactor. compatibility Numerous stub implementations of constants, classes and methods to improve source-level compatibility. other bugfixes Numerous other bugfixes.
0.25.1

New release.

Image library fixes. JPEG (saving) alpha channel fixes and size with resolution != 72. JPEG resolution read support. TIFF saving fixes. Mounting. Improved volumes mounting and support. Portability improvements in volume mounting and support Text layout. Corrected layout of empty strings. Optimizations. Only update visible menus.
0.25.0

New release. Bumped due to detected binary incompatibility between 0.24.0 and 0.24.1.

GIF library update Fixes for new GIF library versions Theming improvements Theming of named images for specific applications by the use of the CFBundleIdentifier in the theme. New icons and corresponding constants for special folders, recycler and others. NSWorkspace Improvements in NSWorkspace icon lookup. Improvements in removable media commands, imported and cleaned from GWorkspace. Other Numerous bug fixes and improvements in Cocoa compatibility. Spanish locale.
0.24.1

From a look through ChangeLog, we can see a lot of bugfixes for this release, with the main focus on avoiding display glitches and improving OSX compatibility.

NSColorListChangedNotification Removed. NSColorPanelColorChangedNotification Removed. NSImageInterpolation{Default,High,Low,None} Removed. NSPrintHorizonalPagination Removed.
0.24.0

This is a major new stable release of GUI. Require newer base release as we moved the -replaceObject:withObject: of NSKeyedUnarchiver there.
New features include:

GIF library update Newer versions of the GIF library (5.0) have an incompatible interface change. We now support the new interface as well as the old one and detect at configure time which one to use. NSTabView flipped NSTabView was the last view class that still had its flipped state defined incorrectly. This finally got corrected. Theme improvements A lot more of the gui appearance is now changable by a theme. The way image names get mapped to real file names when loading has been clearified.Better support for 9-patch images. Additional Cocoa classes NSTreeController, NSTreeNode, NSStatusBar, NSStatusItem, NSTrackingArea Many bugfixes and tweaks to improve look and feel Cursor display is a lot more consistent.
0.23.1

This is a bugfix release containint many minor bugfixes, but most importantly fixing some coding/archiving bugs introduced in in the NSInteger,NSUInteger,CGFloat changes.

0.23.0

This is a major new stable release of GUI. Note that this version is binary incompatible with previous versions on 64-bit systems due to changes in some variables based on changes in GNUstep base to the type of NSNotFound.
New features include:

NSInteger,NSUInteger,CGFloat API and internals updated to use new types NSBezierPath Keyed encoding/decoding added Many bugfixes and tweaks to improve look and feel Most of the changes in this release are individually small changes fixing UI layout issues, responsiveness etc. The accumulated result should be a significantly smoother look and feel.
0.22.0

This is a major new stable release of GUI. Note that to improve stability, some features that were in previous releases have been removed. Newer and better implementation of these features will be added back soon. These include use of ghostscript and ImageMagic to automatically translate image formats, and an implementation of copy-on-scroll in NSClipView. Also note that this version is binary incompatible with previous versions on 64-bit systems due to changes in some variables based on changes in GNUstep base to the type of NSNotFound. New features include:

Support for drawing the GUI with a scale factor, for high-DPI monitors.

This is enabled automatically on Windows when the system DPI setting is changed from its default of 96 in the Windows control panel. It can be enabled on X11 (or the default overridden on Windows) by setting the GSScaleFactor user default. For example, setting this to 1.5 would make everything appear 50% larger.

The scale factor is implemented in GSWindowDecorationView; we use NSView's built-in scaling support and call -[NSWindow userSpaceScaleFactor] to determine how to manipulate the bounds and frame rect of the window decoration view. NSUnscaledWindowMask is respected, if it is part of a window's style mask. Note that changing the scale factor without restarting applications is currently unsupported, and all screens currently share the same scale factor. Both of these limitations should be reasonably easy to fix in a future release, however.

Character panel There is a character panel accessible from a button in the standard Font panel. It requires libicu. Color picker "Magnifier" tool, for grabbing the color of arbitrary parts of the screen Currently only implemented on X11/cairo. Many new image formats supported for reading using Ghostscript and ImageMagick The Ghostscript image rep provides PS/EPS/PDF support, however it has some limitations. It is quite slow. Only the first page is rendered, because we use the pngalpha Ghostscript device, which is the only device supporting 8-bit alpha.

Other improvements:

NSImage

Mac OS X 10.6 drawing methods (-[NSImage drawInRect:fromRect:operation:fraction:respectFlipped:hints:]). The rep selection code was completely overhauled, and it should work much better with images containing many reps. In particular, the DPI metadata in images is now respected, and TIFF images containing multiple resolutions are now fully supported.

Icons are now better supported. By icon, we mean an NSImage whose representations are not all of the same point size. Icons are usually ICNS or TIFF files. (Note that we aren't talking about a TIFF containing sub-images with different pixel sizes but the same point sizes.) The important thing about icons is -[NSImage size] should not be called, because the icon doesn't have one single size in points, but many sizes, so it's not clear which will be returned from this method. Similarly, -[NSImage drawAtPoint:fromRect:operation:fraction:] should be avoided, as should the -compositeToPoint: family of methods, since these use -[NSImage size] to determine how big to draw the image. The benefit of icons is that when -[NSImage drawInRect:fromRect:operation:fraction:] is called, the rep with the largest point size smaller than or equal to the rect to be drawn in will be chosen, resulting in better looking output. For best results, call drawInRect: with a point size you expect the icons to have, like 16x16 or 64x64.

 NSCursor Support for creating 32-bit ARGB cursors on X11 (with the Xcursor library) NSView Autoresizing algorithm reimplemented to be closer to OS X. View frames generated by autoresizing are now rounded to lie on pixel boundaries.
Version 0.20.0

A new stable release. Many improvments with Nib loading, documents and document controllers. Fixed many drawing issues, particularly ones related to flipping. Much improved theming.

NSOutlineView Use NSInteger and CGFloat in method names where appropriate. NSDocument Change result type of method-saveToURL:ofType:forSaveOperation:delegate:didSaveSelector:contextInfo: from BOOL to void. NSView New 10.5 methods. NSCursor New 10.6 methods.
Version 0.18.0

A new stable release that has had many improvements. Many new Mac OS X methods (10.5 and newer) were added. Many Windows specific improvements were made (particularly with the use of the Windows theme). There is also better compatibility with Mac OS X in terms of usage of NSInteger and other definitions.

NSSliderCell Initial implementaiton of circular sliders. Spanish Translation Added spanish translations in various places. NSDrawers They now work. NSTableColumn New 10.6 methods and constants. Themes Usage of themes to draw UI elements is almost completely implemented.
Version 0.17.1

Bug fixes.

NSFont Add some missing interface methods from 10.5 NSSplitView Add live resize (can be turned off with GSUseGhostResize default)
Version 0.17.0

Many many bug fixes and almost complete reorganization of NSToolbar code.

NSBezierPath, NSAttributedString, NSLayoutManager New Mac OS X 10.5 methods. NSSpeechSynthesizer New class. NSSplitView Added new Mac OS X 10.5 methods and some ivars Toolbars Many improvements. NSToolbar methods rearragned and ivar removed. Menus MS Window-stype menus inside a window implemented Garbage Collection Several improvements to work better with GC HelpViewer GSHelpViewer use default added.
Version 0.16.0

This is an stable release. A lot of improvements and bug fixes went into this release. Thanks to Wolfgang Lux for fixing plenty of bugs. Note that gnustep-core is now installed in the LOCAL domain by default instead of the SYSTEM domain. You may want to remove old installations in the SYSTEM domain to avoid any incompatibility problems. Or you can force installation in SYSTEM using make GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DOMAIN=SYSTEM install.

Nib Loading Several methods were added and Nib loading in general was refactored and improved. NSDocument Document autosaving was implemented. NSSavePanel Several methods were added to implement support for document types with multiple allowed file extensions. NSWindow Definitions and skeleton implementation of attachedSheet. NSTextView Renamed and changed types of attributes related to drag and drop. NSLayoutManager New methods added to handle temporary attributes. NSWindowController NSWindowController was made a subclass of NSResponder. NSCell Rearranged somewhat to use GSTheme implemetations. NSTokenField, NSTokenFieldCell New classes added.
Version 0.14.0

This is an stable release.

NSGlyphGenerator New class for glyph generation (separated from other classes). NSControl -mouseDownFlags Added old NeXT method for compatibility. NSSplitView setAutosaveName: implemented and new instance variable added. NSOpenGLView Added some Mac OS X 10.3 methods.
Version 0.13.2

This is an unstable release.

NSPopUpButtonCell The encoding of this object was changed (which is backwards compatible, but not forwards compatible. NSTextView Add new X secondary selection behavior. Other Mac OS X methods added. NSWindow Device interaction with backend has changed. This release of gui requires the coresponding gnustep-back release 0.13.2. NSSegmentedCell New class added to draw and render text in segments. NSDrawer Implemented.
Version 0.13.1

This is an unstable release. Changes to error handling and key-value coding require an update to at least the base library version 1.15.1.

NSMenu Added more MacOS X methods and an ivar. NSView Added support for hiding views. Key-Value bindings Added Key-Value bindings implementation (NSKeyValueBinding) with support in several classes (NSControl, NSTextField, NSView, etc). NSTableView Added some MacOS X 10.4 methods. NSCursor Changed hot point to 0,0 for MacOS X compatibility.
Version 0.13.0

This is an unstable release. Changes to error handling and key-value coding require an update to at least the base library version 1.15.1.

Licence Switched to use LGPL 3 and GPL 3. New Methods added Added new methods from Mac OS X 10.4 for NSDragging, NSFontDescriptor, NSAttributedString, NSImageView, NSStringDrawing, NSParagraphStyle, NSView, NSCell, NSActionCell, NSAlert, NSApplication, NSBitmapImageRep, NSBox, NSColor, NSColorSpace, NSComboBox, NSComboBoxCell, NSDocumentController, NSEvent, NSScreen, NSFont, NSFontManager, NSFormCell, NSForm, NSWindow, NSTextField, NSTextFieldCell. Some ivar names were changed also. Printing Moved Postscript printing methods from NSView to NSGraphicsContext. View drawing Rewrote the NSView drawing mechanism to always use [displayRectIgnoringOpacity:inContext]. Flipped Controls Report more controls as being flipped. (NSTextField, NSTableHeaderView, NSSlider, NSProgressIndicator, NSButton) NSTabView is still missing. Font Attribute Add font attribute fixing to NSAttributedString. To allow for the output of glyphs not present in the current font. Optimization In NSAffineTransform use optimized primitive methods from base. Optimized the validation of edited cells. Key-Value Binding Implementation of special connectors for Key-Value binding.
Version 0.12.0

It has been a long time since the last release and many things have been added and changed, including new classes, new ivars, and new methods.

Tooltips A Tooltip implementation was added. NSBitmapImage Improvements Lots of improvements to the NSBitmapImage subclasses. Theming Improvements GSTheme and other classes were added to improve support of theming. New Methods added Added new methods from Mac OS X 10.4 for NSControl, NSResponder, NSDocument, NSPrintOperation, NSWindowController, NSCell, NSMenuItem, NSView. Some ivar names were changed also. New ivars added Added new ivars for NSMenuItem, NSPrintOperation, NSTableView, NSDrawer, NSScrollView, NSAlert, NSTextView. New Classes Added New classes from Mac OS X 10.4 and earlier were added including NSLevelIndicator, NSObjectController, NSUserDefaultsController, NSKeyValueBinding, NSArrayController, NSController. NSSpellServer moved to base NSSpellServer was moved to GNUstep base for Mac OS X compatibility. NSTabViewType enumerations Enumerations were changed to match values from Mac OS X. GNUstep GUI updated for Make 2.0 GNUstep GUI was updated to work with GNUstep Make 2.0. This includes versioned resources. NSAffineTransform moved to base Much of NSAffineTransform was moved to gnustep-base to match with Mac OS X. Many older methods were marked as deprecated in favor of the more recent Mac OS X methods. NSAlert in alternate threads NSAlerts are performed in the main thread even if called from another thread. NSAnimation Class Added Preliminary code for the NSAnimation class has been added. Only NSAnimationNonBlocking mode implemented.
Version 0.11.0 Keyed Encoding/Archiving Support for keyed encoding has been added to all gui classes. Nib loading Nib loading has been implemented. For the most part, nibs are (or should be) compatible between GNUstep and Mac OS X. Color schemes and Themes Better support for color schemes and themes has been added. In the near future theming should be integrated into gui itself. RTFD Loading and writing of RTFD format was implemented.
Version 0.10.3 Horizontal menus Horizontal (mac)-style menus should now work. Horizontal menus are activated by setting the 'NSMenuInterfaceStyle' user default to 'NSMacintoshInterfaceStyle'. Active applications Better support for tracking active applications was added. Normally a workspace manager should handle this, but the GUI library can handle it on its own if it is not handled any other way.
Version 0.10.2 Power Off The notification center posts a power off notification before sending a terminate: method sent from another app on the assumption that the terminate: is from a session manager.
Version 0.10.1 Sound library GNUstep now uses v19 of portaudio for the sound daemon. Version v19 hasn't been officially released, but it is still used in several distributions (SuSE, etc) as v18 is very old.
Version 0.10.0

The interface version of the gui library has changed in this release. Applications, libraries and tools that wish to use this new version must be recompiled (otherwise, they'll use the older version of the library).

Nib window autopositioning Nib loading has been improved to handle auto-positioning of windows. NSFont An ivar was added to NSFont to cache flipped fonts. NSApplication An ivar was added to track application launch. Keyed Encoding Work was done in many classes to support keyed encoding. It may not be fully implemented in every class, however. Backend Versioning The GUI library now looks for the backend bundle with the corrent interface version. Thus there should not be any problems with the GUI using the wrong backend.
Version 0.9.5

NSColor colors Added new control colors and methods from 10.3 version of Cocoa. NSFont methods Added new font methods from 10.3 version of Cocoa NSApplication -runModalSession Behavior of this method was changed. In particular it deviates from Cocoa documentation. See the GNUstep GUI documentation for specifics. Runtime version discovery of library A developer can discover the version of the gui library that is loaded using the NSBundle methods [[NSBundle bundleForLibrary: @"gnustep-gui"] infoDictionary] and retrieving the GSBundleVersion key.
Version 0.9.4

Interface version change The interface version of the gui library has changed in this release. There is no single reason for this change. Arguably, it should have been done long ago. In the future the interface version will only change with releases that have a new minor version number (that's the second number in the release number). Applications, libraries and tools that wish to use this new version must be recompiled (otherwise, they'll use the older version of the library). PPD's removed All the PPD's have been removed from the gui library into a separate package (gnustep-ppd). There still exists a single Generic Postscript Printer PPD which should work in many cases for printing using the standard lpr interface. In the future, a CUPS interface should be available that provides all the necessary printer information automatically. If you still want use of the PPD's, you must install the gnustep-ppd package, although this is not required for use of gnustep-gui. Printing framework The printing framework was generalized to allow for various types of native printing systems. The lpr system is the only complete one, although CUPS printing is in the works. As such, the printing classes were revamped to handle this, and the actual system-specific code is loaded from a bundle. NSScroller, NSScrollView class size change A new ivar was added to the NSScroller and NSScrollView classes.
Version 0.9.3

Spell checker daemon reimplemented using libaspell If the optional library libaspell is found, the spell checker will use it (otherwise spell checking will not work). New NSComboBox implementation NSComboBox and related classes have been re-implemented and documented. NSToolbar code redone A lot of changes where made to the NSToolbar class to make it more functional. Binary Incompatibilities New ivars were added NSTableView, NSView, NSSavePanel. Applications that use this class and subclasses (e.g. NSOutlineView) may need to be recompiled to work properly.