GSoC 2014 summary: Windows task bar API project
Posted on by Vadim Zeitlin
This is the first in a series of posts about wxWidgets GSoC 2014 projects and it is about Chaobin Zhang’s work on wrapping Windows taskbar API for the use in wxWidgets. The project was a success and I’d like to congratulate Chaobin and thank him and Bryan Petty, who was the mentor on this project, for their work!
The new API additions and things they allow to do are described in more details in Chaobin’s own post here, please read it for more information, but, in short, almost all taskbar features are now accessible via wxWidgets API.
Of course, they still remain unportable and Windows-only and while it’s better
to provide access to them than not do it at all, the main goal of wxWidgets is
to facilitate writing portable applications and so the next target is to build a
higher level API which would be available elsewhere. We have made a start with
wxAppProgressIndicator and wxGA_PROGRESS style for wxGauge using it, but
this is still not implemented for any other platform yet. Any contributions
implementing this (simple) class in terms of NSProgress under OS X or ideas
about how it could be implemented under Linux would be very welcome.