the Clutter 1.2 requests session was pretty good: I got nice feedback from the current users of Clutter in the GNOME platform, both for the planned features and for what is needed. I also was able to talk about GTK+ 3.0 planning outside of the IRC meetings — which started again, so make sure to watch the Wiki page and attend every other Tuesday.

clutter: most of the Clutter discussion has already been summed up by Jason. I’m going to start releasing snapshots of the 1.1 development cycle by the end of this week, to let people test drive the new APIs; feedback is much appreciated.

autotools: I had to catch a red-eye flight to go back from Boston, and I had only 22% of battery left on my laptop, so I decided to go easy on the plane hacking side of things; I just got around to split out the GLib marshallers and enumeration GType generation rules that everyone is copying between projects; those rules now live in two files that you can copy and include at your heart’s content. they work like this:

# glib-genmarshal rules
glib_marshal_list = $(srcdir)/clutter-marshal.list
glib_marshal_prefix = clutter_marshal
include $(top_srcdir)/build/autotools/Makefile.am.marshal

# glib-mkenums rules
glib_enum_h = clutter-enum-types.h
glib_enum_c = clutter-enum-types.c
glib_enum_headers = $(source_h)
include $(top_srcdir)/build/autotools/Makefile.am.enums

and they will also handle the clean and dist rules for you. it would be good to have something like this in gnome-common as well.

json-glib: a couple of weeks ago I released version 0.8; it contains a “fix” for the fact that integers in JSON are defined (or, well, undefined) as machine integers; this allowed braindamaged web services to overflow 32 bits and expect that stuff would not break. nice one. unfortunately, C is a little bit more concerned — and I’d never thought I’d say this — about types and their sizes, so suddenly stuff would start to break; I automatically promoted every integer to 64 bits internally, so this should give us a little bit of wiggle room, at least for the time being. but seriously: incremental integers for unique id without a known length limit? not good design.

Rob did a roundup of the talks that the Intel/Moblin contingent has done and will do here.

yesterday, like Josh and Rob¹, I had my talk on a technology used by Moblin and that can be (or are already) shared with the GNOME Mobile and Desktop platforms.

I talked about Clutter and the 1.0 release; what does it mean, what will be the future direction and some of the highlights of the Clutter library in its current state. instead of using my 30 minutes to do a big talk, I decided to split them into four, five minutes lightning talks, plus an introduction and a conclusion (still five minutes each). I think it worked out pretty well, given the feedback, and I had much more fun while writing it and while delivering it. I’ll put it online on the moblin.org website as soon as the network connection I have access to gets more reliable.

other talks worth of mention: obviously, the gnome-shell and the zeitgest ones, and alexl’s client-side-windows talk. great work by everyone involved — you are all my heroes.

1. also known as “the yummy Rob Bradford”

it’s been a great ride — and it’s just getting started. we’ve been pushing Clutter forward and center of an entire platform user experience, and it was up to to the task to a degree that excited me, and made me incredibly proud.

the Moblin 2.0 UI is also one of the reasons we delayed the 1.0 release — the other being that we wanted to be confident in the API, since we’re going to be committing to it for the next two to three years. the wait is almost over: we’re planning a 1.0 release of Clutter by the end of May¹. prepare yourself to have muchy more fun with Clutter!

1. hopefully, it’ll all be fixed by that time

1. why are we still shipping the dictionary applet?
2. and, more importantly: why are we still shipping a DICT protocol client?

okay, I wrote them both — and I was just trying to save them from the horrid death-by-code-rotting fate they were condemned to — but at the time I did not stop and consider why².

who in their right mind would still use a DICT client — when it’s not perfectly clear³ that only a few DICT servers are alive enough to be useful, and mostly for the english-speaking only world?

so, I ask the interwebs: what kind of electronic dictionary do you commonly use when you need one? do you use Wiktionary and Wikipedia? do you use another web service⁴? or do you use something local, with files you update semi-regularly? what do you use when you need to translate something?

I’d like to address this issue during the 2.27 cycle because I don’t want to let gnome-dictionary end up like gfloppy — a survivor of a different era that only recently we were able to just remove for something far more powerful and useful.

1. hopefully before the cut-off time for the 2.27.1 release
2. the software engineering and programming challenge were, foolishly, all I was interested in; I was young and eager to prove myself
3. go on, look at the two dictionary providers we install with gnome-dictionary, and consider that those two have been the same since 2.12, that is seven development cycles ago
4. with a public API, hopefully

Lego Action Comics #1, by levork — licensed under CC BY-SA

we arrived, admittedly late, but we were absolutely unprepared for the insane queue that was already in place: it went around the entire building. we tried to stay in the queue for some time, but it was clear that we would have had to wait for at least two or three hours in order to get in. albeit very sadly, we decided to get in the store and abandon the quest — drowning the disappointment in sane consumerism.

we got:

• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, volume III: 1910
• Batman: The Long Halloween, by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale — recommended to all who liked The Dark Knight movie and in general to all the Caped Crusader’s fans
• 1602, by Neil Gaiman — I only had this in italian but Gaiman’s writing should not be translated
• Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi
• Blankets, by Craig Thompson

all in all, not much of a free but a great comic books day.

I’m writing an email. therefore it is safe to assume I know what an email address is. you don’t have to shield me from the existence of email addresses, especially if this prevents me from checking that the email I’m sending is effectively directed to the people I intend to, and not to what your brain damaged autocompletion decides to fart in my text entries.

no love,
  Emmanuele.

my only excuse is that I was busy with other things: new job, new office, holidays… you know, whatever happens between coding.

it’s that time of year again, and we’re nearing another Clutter release — this time it’s a special one, though, as it is 1.0.0. which also means that the API will be frozen for the entire duration of the 1.x branch: only additions and deprecations will be allowed¹.

since we’re in the process of finalizing the 1.0 API I thought about writing something about what changed, what was added and what has been removed for good.

let’s start with the Effects API. the Effects were meant to provide a high level API for simple, fire-and-forget animations². they were sub-obtimal in the memory management — you had to keep around the EffectTemplate, the effects copied the timelines — and they weren’t extensible — writing your own effect would have been impossible without reimplementing the whole machinery. after the experiments done by Øyvind and myself, and after looking at what the high-level languages provided, I implemented a new implicit animation API — all based around a single object, with the most automagic memory management possible:

  /* resize the actor in 250 milliseconds using a cubic easing
   * and attach a callback at the end of the animation
   */
  ClutterAnimation *animation =
    clutter_actor_animate (actor, 250, CLUTTER_EASE_IN_CUBIC,
                           "width", 200,
                           "height", 200,
                           "color", &new_color,
                           NULL);
  g_signal_connect (animation, "completed",
                    G_CALLBACK (on_animation_complete),
                    NULL);

this should make a lot of people happy. the easing modes in particular are the same shared among various animation framworks, like tweener and jQuery.

what might make some people slightly less happy is the big API churn that removed both ClutterLabel and ClutterEntry and added ClutterText. the trade-off, though, is clearly in favour of ClutterText, as this is a base class for both editable and non-editable text displays; it supports pointer and keyboard selection, and multi-line as well as single-line editing.

another big changed happened on the low level COGL API, with the introduction of vertex buffers — which allow you to efficiently store arrays of vertex attributes; and, more importantly, with the introduction of the Materials which decouple the drawing operations with the fill operations. it also adds support for multi-texturing, colors and other GL features — on both GL and GLES.

after unifying Label and Entry, we also decided to unify BehaviourPath and BehaviourBspline; after that we added support for creating paths using SVG-like descriptions and for “replaying” a Path on a cairo_t. well, the Cairo integration is also another feature — clutter-cairo has been deprecated and its functionality moved inside ClutterCairoTexture.

one of the last minute additions has been ClutterClone, an efficient way to clone generic actors without using FBOs — which also supercedes the CloneTexture actor.

the Pango integration has been extended, and the internal Pango API exposed and officially supported — now you can display text using the Pango renderer and glyphs cache inside your own custom actors without using internal/unstable API.

thanks to Johan Dahlin and Owen Taylor, Clutter now generates GObject-Introspection data at compile time, so that runtime language bindings will be ready as soon as 1.0.0 hits the internets.

finally, there’s a ton of bug fixes in how we use GL, how we render text, how we relayout actors, etc.

hope you’ll have fun with Clutter!

1. no worries about stagnation, though — we are already planning for 2.0, even though it’ll take at least a couple of years to get there
2. even though people always tried to find new ways to abuse the term “fire-and-forget”

thanks to Damien, I finally found a way to shut up libtool and get a clean output for the build of a project: shave.

Clutter is the first project using it, and I already easily caught compiler warnings¹ because my terminal is not full of crappy, four lines long incantations².

big kudos to Damien!

1. even without using the anal-retentive compiler flags and -Werror
2. and even though I’m not an autotools ninja, at least I read the documentation and not just blindly copy stuff from various projects in the hope they work; so the autotools setup in Clutter is pretty much well tested so that I don’t need to worry that files get installed in a different location than expected

so I decided I was tired of handling stuff on my own, and keeping it working and up to date.

GNOME already has a blogging platform, and I use my blog to talk about GNOME-y stuff anyway — so presto: here’s my new blog, on blogs.gnome.org.

I’m trying to import the old posts here, using the WXR file that my 2.7 exported, but apparently there’s a small mismatch in the Import admin page: it says that it can load up to 8 megs files, but then it chockes with a 1.9 megs one, and it tells me that 1.5 megs are the limit. I’ll trim down the XML and see what happens.

later: WPmu imported the WXR just fine as soon as I removed some of the spam-labelled comments and trackbacks (which shouldn’t have been exported in the first place, if I may add). it did even ask me to import the attachments from their previous location. in one word: awesome!