Well That Was Easy

After a bit more than six months of work, Clutter 0.2.0 is finally out!

We put a lot of effort in making the API a bit less rough around the edges, and adding new features at the same time. Like the new Behaviour objects which can be used to control multiple actors using a function of time; or the fixed point API, which should make Clutter work fast even on embedded devices; or the Pango integration, which should keep the texture memory usage low and give you all the features of pango. On top of that, there’s the new memory management semantic of the actors – now working like GTK+ widgets: now you just ave to add an actor to a group, and the group itself will be responsible of deallocating the memory when the group gets destroyed.

Along with the core library there’s a GStreamer integration library, which you can use to add audio and video support to a Clutter application; a Cairo integration library, for drawing directly on a Clutter texture actor; and, obviously, Perl and Python bindings, so that you don’t have to use C to use Clutter.

Clutter is still a work in progress, and we at OpenedHand hope to add even more new features in the 0.3 development cycle – some of them are already planned and in the works right now. What we need are application developers willing to use Clutter and telling us what we need to add to Clutter to make it rock even more.

5 Replies to “Well That Was Easy”

  1. Hi Emmanuele! Good to see further efforts being put into Clutter. I wish I had time left to give it a more serious spin and do some funky magic with it. There are some ideas in my head how to stress it, but atm I’m unable to allocate time to testing it. Please, don’t stop pushing Clutter. Stuff like this is severely needed!

  2. @ryan: unfortunately, I don’t know ruby well enough to even attempt working on bindings; but if someone wants to work on them I’ll more than gladly provide assistance.

    @macslow: sure, and if you ever find some time and have ideas (or code) just drop me a mail.

  3. @luca: unfortunately, screenshots are not that easy being an opengl application; also there isn’t much to record – just the example programs shipped with clutter core. I had to use istanbul to record an ogg/theora of the behaviour example and the results were less than impressive (slow, losing fps). so I guess that the only way to see how clutter works really is downloading and giving it a spin. :-)

Comments are closed.