The GTK+ team is proud to announce the release of version 2.0 of the GTK+ widget toolkit and associated libraries (GLib, Pango, and ATK). The result of 3 years work with contributions from hundreds of volunteers, GTK+-2.0 represents a major step forward in free software user interface toolkits. What is GTK+ ============ GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off projects to complete application suites. GTK+ is based on three libraries developed by the GTK+ team: - GLib is the low-level core library that forms the basis of GTK+ and GNOME. It provides data structure handling for C, portability wrappers, and interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event loop, threads, dynamic loading, and an object system. - Pango is a library for layout and rendering of text, with an emphasis on internationalization. It forms the core of text and font handling for GTK+-2.0. - The ATK library provides a set of interfaces for accessibility. By supporting the ATK interfaces, an application or toolkit can be used with such tools as screen readers, magnifiers, and alternative input devices. GTK+ has been designed from the ground up to support a range of languages, not only C/C++. Using GTK+ from languages such as Perl and Python (especially in combination with the Glade GUI builder) provides an effective method of rapid application development. Earlier versions of GTK+ have been used in a wide range of applications; perhaps the most well known examples being the GNOME desktop and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Version 2.0 of GTK+ offers the same flexibility that made GTK+-1.0 and GTK+-1.2 so popular, and adds a much enhanced feature set, increased ease of programming for application developers, and ease of use for end users. GTK+ is free software and part of the GNU Project. However, the licensing terms for GTK+, the GNU LGPL, allow it to be used by all developers, including those developing proprietary software, without any license fees or royalties. GTK+ 2.0 is the foundation of the GNOME 2.0 desktop, to be released later this year. GTK+ 2.0 will be available in standard installations of Solaris, Linux, and HP-UX. What's new in GTK+-2.0 ====================== To list just a few of the new features in GTK+-2.0: - Enhanced internationalization support via Pango including full Unicode support throughout all GTK+ widgets, and support for all the world's major scripts, including along with Roman, Cyrillic, and Asian scripts, right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew, and Indic scripts such as Devanagari. - A powerful text widget, supporting multiple views of a single buffer, a complete set of options for styled text, and the full range of internationalization capabilities provided by Pango. - A flexible widget for tree and list display, with features such as a model-view split for abstracting data storage from display, the ability to create custom models to accommodate large data sets, versatile display/rendering features, and editable data cells. - Support for accessibility technology via ATK - Integration of the gdk-pixbuf library for loading and manipulating images. - Hundreds of improvements to the programming interfaces to address specific difficulties developers had with earlier versions of GTK+. - Usability improvements, including comprehensive support for keyboard navigation. - A clean and attractive new default appearance. - Abstraction of the type and object system so that it can be used not just for widgets, but for programmatic objects throughout the GTK+ libraries. - Previews of ports to Microsoft Windows and direct frame buffer display. (A final version of the Windows port is expected within a month or two.) - Systematically simplified and enhanced API based on thousands of user requests and questions fielded by the GTK+ team. This has resulted in many hundreds of small API tweaks and additions too detailed to list here. Where to get more information about GTK+-2.0 ============================================ Information about GTK+ including links to documentation can be found at http://www.gtk.org/ More information about Pango can be found at http://www.pango.org/ More information about ATK can be found at http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ - GLib-2.0.0 release announcement http://www.gtk.org/glib-2.0.0-announce.html - Pango-1.0.0 release announcement http://www.gtk.org/pango-1.0.0-announce.html - ATK-1.0.0 release announcement http://www.gtk.org/atk-1.0.0-announce.html - Complete GTK+-2.0.0 release announcement http://www.gtk.org/gtk+-2.0.0-announce.html An installation guide for GTK+-2.0 is found at: http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk-building.html