[ANNOUNCE] Clutter 0.2.0

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

good news everyone!

after a tad more than six months, and much work in the SVN, Clutter
0.2.0 is finally out.  grab it while it's still hot:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/
  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/0.2/

while you're at it, have a look at the spiffy new web site:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/
  http://www.clutter-project.org/blog/

for this release the NEWS file is quite big, reflecting the amount of
work that was done after the 0.1 release, last July:

Clutter 0.2 (2007-01-18)
========================

 * List of changes between 0.2 and 0.1
   o Bindings, GStreamer and GTK+ dependencies moved out of tree:
     now Clutter strictly depends on Xlibs, OpenGL and GdkPixbuf only.
   o Actors now have an initial floating reference; this means you
     don't have to explicitely unref them: every memory an actor
     allocates will be freed when the group containing the actor will
     be destroyed.
   o Add basic run-time detection of GL features.
     + Use GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE_ARB if available.
     + Attempt to set up sync to vblank (set CLUTTER_VBLANK=none to disable)
   o Add API for behaviours. A ClutterBehaviour is an object which
     drives a set of actors using one or more properties depending
     on the value of an "alpha" function.
     + Provide simple behaviours: ClutterBehaviourOpacity,
       ClutterBehaviourPath and ClutterBehaviourScale.
     + Provide simple alpha functions for ramps and sine waveforms.
   o Add fixed point API for embedded platforms with no FPU.
   o Add support for command line switches to Clutter, like debug
     flags and abort on warnings; also allow application to hook up
     into the initialisation sequence to add their own command line
     switches.
   o Add Pango GL renderer for Clutter, and use it to render text
     inside the ClutterLabel actor; this decrease texture memory
     usage. 
   o Redo Clutter Label widget, using the new Pango renderer.
   o Clutter Textures do not store local pixbuf copy (of texture).
   o Redo group and actor scale/sizing API and functionality.
   o Add memory management API for ClutterColor, and string parsing.
 * List of bug fixed
   o #199 - Little group handling fix?
   o #198 - Detect NPOT support on more systems
   o #197 - Tiled textures are broken
   o #196 - Rebuild the examples when the library changes
   o #156 - clutter_actor_set_position not using the absolute size
   o #155 - Don't test for XInitThreads [Bastien Nocera]
   o #154 - Key presses not working in super-oh example [Bastien Nocera]
   o #152 - Misc fixes [Bastien Nocera]
   o #143 - Faulty ref-counting in clutter_group_remove [Frederic Riss]
   o #141 - Copy-pasto in clutter_media_set_volume [Frederic Riss]
   o #101 - No package 'x11' found -- wrong configure [Tomasz Torcz]
   o  #98 - Enabling trails in super-oh crashes

and if this doesn't seem enough to you, today we released the GStreamer
integration library clutter-gst and the core bindings for both Perl and
Python:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter-gst/0.2/
  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter-perl/0.2/
  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/pyclutter/0.2/

if you want, you can help with the great plan for the 0.3 development
cycle:

  http://svn.o-hand.com/view/clutter/trunk/clutter/TODO

now go on: play with Clutter, file bugs and requests for enhancements
and help making Clutter rock even more!


About Clutter
-------------
Clutter is an open source software library for creating fast, visually
rich graphical user interfaces. The most obvious example of potential
usage is in media center type applcations. We hope however it can be
used for a lot more.

Clutter uses OpenGL (and soon optionally OpenGL ES) for rendering but
with an API which hides the underlying GL complexity from the developer.
The clutter API is intended to be easy to use, efficient and flexible. 

Home
----
http://www.clutter-project.org


Subversion Repository
---------------------
Check out with:

  svn co http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/clutter/trunk clutter 

Browseable via http://svn.o-hand.com/view/clutter/.


Mailing List
------------
Send a blank message to clutter+subscribe o-hand com . Then follow
instructions in resulting reply.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,  E: ebassi gmail com
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net