[ANNOUNCE] Clutter 0.8.0 (core)

[Matthew Allum <mallum openedhand com>]

Hello all!

Clutter 0.8.0 - 'Smogun' - is now available for download at:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/0.8

MD5 Checksums:

  ec7be7de08d7d52660231566a14df5c0  clutter-0.8.0.tar.gz
  e24e8c2efdbf3970788407808b4218dd  clutter-0.8.0.tar.bz2

What is Clutter
===============

Clutter is an open source software library which aids the creation of
modern, fast, visually rich and animated graphical user interfaces with
minimal effort.

It is a mid-level toolkit built around OpenGL and OpenGL ES technologies
for both desktop and mobile support. Clutter takes full advantage of the
power of OpenGL, but substitutes a simple and intuitive API for the
complexity of writing OpenGL code -- it makes common and typical UI
tasks (such as animations and text rendering) easy and effortless, yet,
remains extensible to accommodate even the most radical next-generation
UI designs.

Clutter is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
License version 2.1.

Clutter currently requires:

  * GLib >= 2.14.0 
  * Pango 1.x 
  * OpenGL >= 1.4, OpenGL ES 1.1 or OpenGL ES 2.0
  * GLX, SDL, WGL, Quartz or an EGL Implementation

For more information on Clutter
===============================

The official website is: http://www.clutter-project.org
The Clutter blog is at:  http://www.clutter-project.org/blog
Clutter documentation is at: http://clutter-project.org/docs.html

To subscribe to the Clutter mailing list, send mail to: 
  clutter+subscribe o-hand com 
The official mailing list archive is: http://lists.o-hand.com/clutter/

Notes
=====

   o This is the first release of the stable 0.8 cycle.

   o This version is API and ABI incompatible with previous stable
     release of Clutter, 0.6

   o This version is parallel installable with Clutter 0.6. Installing
     this version will overwrite the files from the installation of a
     SVN checkout of the current stable branch (clutter-0-8).

   o Bugs should be reported to http://bugzilla.o-hand.com

What's new in Clutter 0.8.0
===========================

   o 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 

   o 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. 

   o 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 

   o Clutter now seamlessly supports multiple stages (windows) on the 
     backends that allow this feature. Stages are also now sub 
     class-able.

   o 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.

   o  Numerous ClutterTexture Improvements. Including;
         - Image loading from disk.
         - Easier subclassing with custom 'deformed' rendering.
         - Mipmap support.
         - 'keep-aspect-ratio' property.
         - Repeating tiling fixes.
            
   o 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.

   o 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.   

   o The ClutterContainer interface has been extended with a flexible
     infrastructure to store container specific per actor state.

   o 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 more information on the above see both the NEWS and README files in
the release tarball.

List of bugs fixed since 0.7.6
==============================

The list of bugs fixed is quite long; for the complete list since 0.6,
see the other 0.7 release announcements.

   o #993 - "Underline colors are sometimes wrong"
   o #998 - "clutter always captures X input events; this is the 
             badness for compositing"
   o #1000 - "clutter-x11 should define gtypes for its enumerations"
   o #1004 - "Fix ""edge-detect"" shader"
   o #1007 - "Fix TFP fallback mechanism"
   o #1008 - "tfp still a bit borked"
   o #1011 - "Fix TFP fallback mechanism (take 2)"
   o #1012 - "clutter_stage_read_pixels() has incorrect alpha data on
              some (most?) cards"
   o #1013 - "Per device grabs are not obeyed in pointer device 
              propagation."
   o #1015 - "Cloning unparented actors with FBOs doesn't work with new 
              layout code"
   o #1016 - "Changing window-redirect-automatic property after 
              creating ClutterX11TexturePixmap doesn't work"
   o #1019 - "clutter-frame-source.h not included by clutter.h"
   o #1022 - "extern inline functions in clutter-fixed.h"
   o #1033 - "Manually parsing command line options prevents 
              initializing clutter"

A list of these fixed bugs can be found at:
http://bugzilla.o-hand.com/buglist.cgi?bug_id=993,998,1000,1004,1007,1008,1011,1012,1013,1015,1016,1019,1022,1033

Special thanks to all the contributors:
=======================================

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


10/07/2008, Matthew Allum, Emmanuele Bassi