Ikke's Blog

Post details: Clutter, advanced UI graphics made fun

Nov 8
Clutter, advanced UI graphics made fun

Today I looked at Clutter, a nifty "rich UI" creation library using OpenGL and the like. After playing around with some of the samples, reading some API docs and writing one dumb simple text-rotating application (think Windows' text-message screensaver, you know), I wanted to make something more advanced (hum-hum).

I decided writing some photo slideshow application would be cool. We already have several of those, obviously, remember this is just a playground.
Having some sort of F-Spot (a great photo management application) integration would be nifty too, so I started with that: loading taglists and picture-paths for one tag. In the end it turned out writing that took more time than writing the simple view I created.

Next I wrote the Clutter driver code and some system to be able to easily switch view functions. I only implemented one so far, which just fades between images (in, out, next image in, out etc) and stores the GdkPixbuf's in a ringbuffer. Not optimal, no cleanup code yet, jadajadajada.

No screenshots as a static screenshot would not be very impressive (the current application neither but hey ;-)).

Anyway, it might be useful as a sample/basic Clutter application for some people. You can find the source code, clone URL and compilation instructions here. If you implement some nifty view, share it!

Enjoy.

Comments:

Comment from: Matt [Visitor] Email
Thanks man. I am sort of dabbling in learning C/C++ (mainly out of curiosity), this has been a big help with clutter. Cheers.
PermalinkPermalink 11/08/07 @ 05:45
Comment from: Corey Burger [Visitor] Email
You should take a look at Macslow's lowfat. It needs work and having combined effort would actually produce something faster!
PermalinkPermalink 11/08/07 @ 07:19
Comment from: Ikke [Member] · http://www.eikke.com
Matt: glad it's useful to at least someone :-)
Corey: IIRC lowfat is written using more low-level OpenGL, which I don't know (yet). I did not intend to write a full-fledged slideshow app whatsoever, actually the main reason I started to look at Clutter was to write some (non-interactive) "public information display", easy to manage for non-geeks, software.
PermalinkPermalink 11/08/07 @ 10:55
Comment from: Dave Foster [Visitor] Email
Certainly not to rain on anything here but someone in the gnome world has done something similar:
njpatel dot blogspot dot com/2007/06/flickr-clutter-fluttr.html

(it won't let me submit that in link form!)

Clutter looks increasingly cool, and I plan on looking at your implementation here to find out how to use it a bit better. It seems to be in a constant flux though, so I'm not sure learning it now would really be useful.
PermalinkPermalink 11/08/07 @ 16:13
Comment from: Ikke [Member] · http://www.eikke.com
I repeat: I know this is nothing really "new", it's just a playground.

Oh and, my antispamsystem dislikes blogspot.
PermalinkPermalink 11/08/07 @ 17:29
Comment from: Dave Foster [Visitor] Email
Yeah, it's cool. I've just updated my clutter build and will try to do some examples when I get home. I can't run glx stuff over vnc :)
PermalinkPermalink 11/08/07 @ 17:47

This post has 1 feedback awaiting moderation...

Leave a comment:

Your email address will not be displayed on this site.
Your URL will be displayed.

Allowed XHTML tags: <p, ul, ol, li, dl, dt, dd, address, blockquote, ins, del, span, bdo, br, em, strong, dfn, code, samp, kdb, var, cite, abbr, acronym, q, sub, sup, tt, i, b, big, small>
(Line breaks become <br />)
(Set cookies for name, email and url)
(Allow users to contact you through a message form (your email will NOT be displayed.))

Categories

Who's Online?

  • Guest Users: 19

Misc

XML Feeds

What is RSS?