# Installation and Release Notes

Unless you installed a binary version of wxWidgets (e.g. under Linux using your distro's package manager), you will probably have to compile the wxWidgets library before you can start use it.

Please read the platform-specific `readme.txt` and `install.txt` for how to do this:

- Readme: General ReadMe, wxMSW (wxMSW for WinXP), wxGTK, wxOSX, wxMotif, wxQt wxX11, Univ, wxiOS
- Installation: wxMSW, wxGTK, wxMotif, wxX11, wxOSX, wxQt,
- General change log
- Licence: Preamble, Licence, Documentation Licence, L-GPL, GPL

# Documentation

The wxWidgets manual is available in various formats; the availability of the following formats depends on what you've downloaded from the wxWidgets website:

- HTML
- MS HTML Help (CHM)
- wxHTML Help (HTB)
- Rich Text Format (RTF)
- Portable Document Format (PDF)

To use the manual in the wxHTML Help format (extension `htb`), you can use the HelpView application, compiling it from the `utils/helpview` folder in the wxWidgets distribution.

Also note that beyond the wxWidgets manual there are various other resources which can help to learn wxWidgets programming:

- The wxWidgets website: Contains FAQs, tutorials, info about the mailing lists, and in general everything related to the wxWidgets world is linked here.
- The wxWidgets forum: Provides a discussion board about various wxWidgets topics (contains also localized forums).
- The wxWiki: A user-editable website with lots of tutorials, links to external tools, resources, etc.

# Contributor Notes

Contributor notes contain information useful only to wxWidgets developers for the maintainance of the project:

- Index of Contributor Notes

Todo List for wxWidgets:

- wxWiki Todo List
- Documentation Todo List

# Demos

The following are fully-fledged applications which demonstrate some features of wxWidgets (for a list of the 70+ samples please look at the manual):

- bombs: minesweeper-like game.
- forty: a great little card game by Chris Breeze.
- fractal: fractal mountains by Andrew Davison.
- life: the game of Life by J. H. Conway, implemented in wxWidgets by Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia.
- poem: a little poetry display program.