Improve Shotwell Slideshow - Weekly Report #2

[Alexandre Rosenfeld <alexandre rosenfeld gmail com>]

Hey guys, sorry for the late report,

This week I did what I planned, put Clutter inside Shotwell. It was easier then I thought, I'm already able to playback slideshows using Clutter with some very smooth fade transitions. I added some basic buttons using Mx and tried to style them, but it didnt worked, so they look kind of ugly. Not sure if a dependency on Mx is required or even desired. Although it makes some things easier.

However, switching to Clutter means adding one more dependency to Shotwell (something we can make optional) but also requires the use of a recent graphics card (as far as I know, the Intel ones which are the most popular these days is enough). So I probably need some plan for the fallback, but I don't like having different codes for the same thing (especially transitions).

I also had time to play with transition effects. The current architecture won't serve if we switch to Clutter, because it's based on Cairo. And I was thinking about something with room to expansion. I got inspired by Animoto to start thinking about a system where two or more pictures can appear at once at the screen and the transition plugin would define a path for each, with some kind of effect. This would allow for effects like those on Animoto and I believe won't be so hard if done using Clutter's animation framework. Well, I need to put this on paper to examine the possibilites.

Plans for next week: investigate fallback mode (talk to my mentor about this) and prototype transition effects API.
Side tasks: update wiki and publish code so far.

Alexandre Rosenfeld