Apology Song

this much is clear: I suck at the whole blogging thing. I was planning on writing up what awesome new features we were planning to add in Clutter 1.2 and before I knew it I was releasing 1.2.0 — all without actually writing a single blog post. no wonder that people drops by on the #clutter IRC channel and doesn’t know about Layout Managers, or the new Animator class.

anyway, for Clutter 1.4 I’m not going to repeat this mistake, so I’m going to talk about new features as they land in the Git repository.

let’s take this commit from Neil: cogl: Support retained paths. this commit not only adds the ability to keep around a path defined using the Cogl API: it’s a step in the direction of making Clutter fully retained ((we actually are mostly retained; we have a couple of areas where we don’t but those are getting fixed in a backward compatible way wherever they might involve third party code)), even at its lowest levels, so that we can apply some heuristics to optimize the painting of the scene graph. pretty exciting stuff, especially for our friends on embedded platforms or on underpowered GPUs.

on the high-level side, the ebassi/wip/actor-effects branch contains some new API and classes to attach an effect to an actor; by “effect” I mean anything that should affect the way an actor paints itself — similarly to what you might want to do in a handler for the paint signal, but cleaner. for instance, we can create an off-screen buffer and render an actor (and all of its contents) to that, and then apply a fragment shader — like this desaturation effect. this should deprecate the clunky ClutterShader API, and make applying and animating a fragment shader easy peasy.

we’re planning more, much more for the 1.4 release, though — including a new Clutter website ((if you jump in #clutter I can give you a sneak peek to the wiki ;-) )).