0.2 Release and future plans

Woohoo, 0.2 is out the door! We can now focus on future plans for the next stable release (0.4).

Plans include:

OpenGL ES & EGL support. This was an original goal for Clutter and this is one of the reasons the GL usage has been keep pretty simple. GL ES Support has already been roughly prototyped in the 'backends' branch and you'll notice internal math in Clutter is fixed point based (GL ES type platforms typically lack an FPU) ready for this. This work will also bring 'stage abstraction' meaning we can run over other GL implementations other than GLX and a GL/GL ES abstraction layer.

New more advanced actors. Now we have a pretty solid base the plan is to start adding some more featureful actors. Initially planned are layout containers and text entrys. Keep in mind we're not really aiming for regular desktop style applications with Clutter (use GTK+ for that) so expect these to be a little raw but flexible.

Better event handling. Clutter input event handling is pretty basic (being global to stage). We've been thinking about how to improve on this with per actor events and a simple focus model. The aim is to keep it simple, potentially handle things like multipoint and not impact on performance.

Fix GTK+ widget and improve Cairo actor. The Clutter GTK+ widget has a very strange bug where all textures are rendered as solid white rectangles. We hoped to get this fixed for the 0.2 release but failed with numerous attempts. It is a very strange bug indeed. The Cairo actor basically works but its just lacking a little love. It would also be good to battle glitz again it getting it to share GL contexts and thus have the actor accelerated (currently its not).

More Clutter Applications. Currently the only Clutter applications we know of are whats shipped with Clutter in examples/ (also in bindings) and opt (A basic prototyped presentation program). We have some other toys in the pipeline which should appear soon in svn but our real hope is others start now to pick up Clutter and start creating applications. This will really help drive Clutter development.