Clutter Reaches 1.0 Release Candidate Status 78
nerdyH writes "Intel's interesting 3D UI technology has arrived at a significant milestone. Emmanuele Bassi on Monday released Clutter 1.0rc1, commenting 'This is a development release of Clutter 0.9 leading towards the 1.0 stable cycle. It is the first release candidate for the 1.0.0 release.' Clutter is a centerpiece of Intel's Moblin stack for netbooks, MIDs, and IVIs. It aims beyond the traditional 2D 'desktop' UI metaphor, stepping up to a 'theatrical' metaphor in which 2D interface objects are likened to 'actors' moving around on a 3D 'stage,' with developers in the role of 'director.' Also updated Tuesday: the Clutter-GTK+ library, aimed at helping GTK+ developers Clutter up their existing apps."
Re:Screenshot (Score:4, Informative)
a video? like, I don't know, this one [youtube.com]? :-)
the Moblin 2.0 UI for netbooks is probably the best showcase of what Clutter can do.
Re:Intel Cleanup Follows? (Score:3, Informative)
They're revamping their whole product line with names like this.
New speech synthesis software: Mutter
actually, the fork of the Metacity window manager using Clutter to handle the scenegraph is called Mutter
Re:Demo (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYGp6iBmCyM
Re:No screenshots (Score:4, Informative)
I agree that the summary is bad, and the clutter website is also very poor at communicating its purpose. However you should have stopped there before going on to make a number of very ignorant assertions.
First of all, yes it is C-based. This is probably the right language for the job, seeing as it is trivial to make automatic bindings to all of the appropriate application development languages. Under the hood, Clutter is object-oriented through and through, but in a way that's more easily compatible with other languages than, say, C++.
I'm not sure why you mention web use at all here. We need to have low-level APIs in the OS to make the fancy web stuff possible, don't we? How else will Flash display in the browser except through drawing APIs provided by the operating system. On OS X Flash uses, you guessed it, CoreImage and the like to display. Clutter is definitely accurately described as a CoreImage, CoreAnimations, etc for X11. And it looks like it will enable some pretty amazing things. If Clutter were to become dominant, it could be used to great effect in Android, for example, to enable the kind of polished user interfaces with feedback animations, etc, that users have come to expect. Something that GTK and, to a lesser extent, Qt cannot do very well. There's a reason that Palm and Android don't use standard widget toolkits; they currently just don't allow the polish and flexibility needed outside of conventional, traditional apps.
Your comment about it being too little for 3D games and too much for business apps is pretty odd too. For business apps, clutter probably won't really be used directly by developers at all. Instead it will be used by the widget toolkits to provide very smooth, alpha-blended animated controls and widgets that don't consume a ton of CPU (or battery) power. For 3D gaming, clutter could definitely help provide nice UIs that all games, even 3D games need, especially if it's with OpenGL, clutter can operate on the same canvas as the fancy 3D graphics. Right now a lot of open source games often have to either create their own 2D UI libraries on top of OpenGL.
Before you criticize, perhaps take a look at where Linux desktops and devices are now and where they need to go. Clutter seems to be one of the best ways to get there, even if you don't understand what it does.
Anyway as a developer I'm not quite sure where clutter directly fits into my programs, but I'm looking forward to seeing what Clutter enables in the higher level toolkits that I do use, such as GTK. Currently trying to make an animated UI element (say a page element that pops up and flips over to show a new page) is very very difficult in GTK. Clutter promises to make this much much easier. Note that Qt already has its own Clutter-like API--maybe they will base their API on a clutter backend much as they've switched their event engine to glib).