pgAdmin is a multiplatform tool. This means that you can use it on various operating systems, such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and even Solaris. Not sure if that last one is still supported. To be honest, I write bugfixes and new features on my Linux laptop (Fedora 16), and checks them, whenever I can, on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard, on my old Mac Mini) and Windows (XP, still on the old Mac Mini). We use wxWidgets to make it easier to code user interfaces for all platforms. pgAdmin supports wxWidgets 2.8. The developers of wxWidgets are working hard on the next big release, 3.0. To ease the jump, they have a 2.9 release since quite some time. This 2.9 version will become 3.0 "when it's ready".
I'm really happy to see that we are now compatible with 2.9. There are probably still some itches to fix, but it's already quite usable.
Peter Geoghegan was the first one to work on this, and wrote a big patch, that Dave Page applied on 2011-02-01. There were a few fixes here, and there. The second phase, done by Peter, was the merge of the wxOGL contrib into our source tree (we had the author's permission for that). And then another bunch of fixes, mostly from reports sent by Colin Beckingham, and fixed by me.
Right now, I have something that works great on Linux.
Why is it important? because it offers a better support of new features of the operating systems, and it fixes a lot of issues we had previously with wxWidgets 2.8 that the developers of wxWidgets couldn't fix (either because it would require too much changes, or because they don't have the manpower to do it). 2.9 also adds some widgets that we would definitely love to use :
- a property grid ;
- a list control with a tree in the first column (to display tree where each item has informations to display in columns) ;
- a native calendar control for Linux (the previous one is a wxWidgets custom control, and is not really usable) ;
- a tree control with checkbox (we have that via a custom widget, one that we could get rid of... remember, less code is good) ;
- and probably many other interesting enhancements (for example, support for GTK3 would make my day).
If you can test pgAdmin 1.15 with wxWidgets 2.9, please send any issues to pgadmin-hackers.