The Clutter team are extremely pleased to announce the new 0.8 stable release of Clutter core. This is probably our biggest and most exciting release yet.

You can download the 0.8.0 tarball from here.

So whats new? Quite alot;

• COGL, the underlying GL abstraction layer in Clutter, has been
  completely rewritten from the ground up. It is now a more mature,
  fully documented abstraction layer across OpenGL, OpenGL ES 1.1
  and OpenGL ES 2.0. COGL allows Clutter Applications the unique
  ability to run on both Desktop and Mobile hardware with no source
  level modifications. New features include;
  • Much improved and wider tested OpenGL ES 1.1 support.
  • OpenGL ES 2.0 Support.
  • Rich scalable texture support, supporting numerous pixel formats,
    transparent tiling, mipmapping, deformation etc.
  • Overhauled clipping functionality
  • Path based vector drawing functionality.
  • FBO & Shader support across OpenGL and OpenGL ES.
  • Image loading and image library wrapping.
  • Full API documentation
• Increased portability. Clutter now provides experimental native
  backend support for the Microsoft Windows(tm) platform and
  Apple(tm) iPhone and iPod Touch families of products as well
  improvements to existing OSX, GLX, SDL and EGL backends.
• The X11 based backends now feature support for Actors that wrap
  external X drawables (i.e the texture-from-pixmap extension and
  fallbacks). This primarily allows for the creation of desktop
  compositing type applications with Clutter.
• Clutter now seamlessly supports multiple stages (windows) on the
  backends that allow this feature. Stages are also now sub
  class-able.
• The custom Pango text renderer has been completely rewritten, now
  using the more modern PangoCairo (instead of FT2), and avoids
  nasty subclassing hacks; it supports smooth fast scaling of
  text, has many edge case issues fixed and it still is very
  efficient (using a texture glyph cache). It is even a little bit
  faster.
• Numerous ClutterTexture Improvements. Including;
  • Image loading from disk.
  • Easier subclassing with custom ‘deformed’ rendering.
  • Mipmap support.
  • ‘keep-aspect-ratio’ property.
  • Repeating tiling fixes.
• Multiple pointer device support. Clutter now features support for
  multiple simultaneous pointing devices including event processing
  and grabs. The feature is backend dependant and currently
  provided by X11 (with optional new XInput support) and Apple(tm)
  iPhone ‘fruity’ backends.
• Completely rewritten the size negotiation API and implementation,
  which allows the creation of fluid and dynamic layout management,
  using natural and minimum sizes, and different geometry management
  like height-for-width and width-for-height. Classic ‘fixed’ layout
  still available and not impeded.
• The ClutterContainer interface has been extended with a flexible
  infrastructure to store container specific per actor state.
• The timeline behaviour has been updated and made more consistent;
  ClutterEntry has been improved with regards to multi-byte text
  and cursor handling; the API documentation coverage has been
  extended; performance on OpenGL ES has been improved;
  ClutterScript improvements.

For further detailed information see the README and NEWS files. The List of bugs fixed since 0.7.6 are here. The full mailing list announcement is available here.

A very big thanks to all those that have contributed to this release:

Chris Lord, Neil Roberts, Robert Bragg, Haakon Sporsheim, Xan López, Jussi Kukkonen, Armin Burgmeier, Tommi Komulainen, Iain Holmes, Havoc Pennington, Lucas Rocha, Johan Bilien, Ivan Leben, Richard Purdie, Gwenole Beauchesne, David Stanczak, Peter Enzerink, Andy Wingo, Peter Csaszar, James Ketrenos.

Expect the various Clutter ‘add on’ library’s and bindings to be updated for 0.8 in coming days.

As always, have fun with Clutter!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 5:16 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.