wxWidgets Project Suggestions

This page outlines ideas for projects that could contribute towards improving wxWidgets. In general, the projects listed here don't have any active maintainer (unless explicitly mentioned otherwise), please see our roadmap for the list of projects we are already working on plus some of the more crucial to-do items. In both cases, we appreciate the help from the community, please join us if you want to participate in the development of wxWidgets!

See also Who's Doing What.


UDP support in wxSocket
wxDatagramSocket should be finished.

A better wxUrl class
The existing wxURL unfortunately doesn't provide any methods for parsing the URLs. There doesn't seem to be any small, freely available (meaning "under the same conditions as wxWidgets itself" here) library doing URL parsing neither so we probably must do it ourselves.

OLE Automation/CORBA
This would unify the concepts of OLE Automation and CORBA, making it possible (to some extent) to write cross-platform components. It would also be useful to have an ActiveX capability (client and/or server) - see the partially completed wxOLE project here. Note: wxAutomationObject is now implemented in wxWidgets, but on Windows only. This allows an application to be an automation controller. See also the wxIE project in Contributions.

Event table tool
To help choose the right event table macros, a tool could be written that would allow selection of a macro and copying to the clipboard. The text can then be pasted into the user's favourite editor.

DirectX/DirectSound
On Windows, it would be handy to be able to use DirectX for optimising graphics, with emulation on other platforms. With DirectSound, multiple soundtracks could be played simultaneously.

Integration of VTK
VTK is a major 3D graphics visualisation toolkit; more work needs to be done on wxWin integration.

More graphics formats support
The existing handlers may be improved, for example support of reading and writing of the generic TIFF tags would be nice to have. Some of the handlers have problems: 4-bit PNG support under Windows may need fixing. (Is this still true?)

Tex2RTF improvements
The Tex2RTF parser needs to be rewritten, probably using YACC/LEX, and further formats supported such as Windows HTML help.

Accessibility support
wxTTS is an attempt to start providing text-to-speech support. The FreePhone component of wxTTS needs debugging for memory errors. Also, we could provide a framework for the structure of an application to be made explicit and accessible using only text input/output.

Update January 2003: we should use Microsoft and GTK+ accessibility APIs.

An IDE
See the Tools for some IDE-like projects, but there is still a need for an all-round, C++-based IDE and resource editor. Many such wxWidgets IDE projects have been started, and none have yet come up with the goods. See: wxWorkshop.

A tutorial
We need a decent tutorial or book. See the existing tutorials in the Documentation page. Julian is currently (January 2003) submitting book proposals to publishers.

Further ports
We need other ports -- for example Windows CE, PalmPilot, Symbian.

Publicity
People can contribute publicity by various means, including the following:

  • Postings to newsgroups, e.g. mentioning wxWidgets when answering a GUI-related question;
  • other word-of-mouth publicity;
  • writing articles;
  • linking to the wxWidgets site;
  • suggesting bundling with Linux CD-ROMs, programming CD-ROMs, products, magazines;
  • mentioning wxWidgets in their product documentation.

See the docs/publicity directory in CVS (head) for some notes on newsgroups, web sites, etc.