Comment Clutter on embedded devices (Score 1) 78
With OpenGL cores becoming more prevalent on SoC (System-on-Chip) devices - e.g. TI's OMAP3530 or Broadcom's 7413 - there's a lot more you can achieve graphically on your mobile phone, set-top box etc. despite the relatively slow CPU core which enables the device the be designed and built cheaply. I have a project which targets these types of devices and so spent a few days playing with Clutter. I came away impressed.
It presents a very simple C API for building up 3D scenes using 2D objects (images, text etc.), hiding the complexities of OpenGL from you, as well as the differences between OpenGL-ES (as you are likely to find in the embedded world) and OpenGL proper (as you will find on your desktop PC). As well building up your scene, Clutter handles animation. You can say "rotate this group of objects 45 degrees around the Z axis in 2 seconds, 'easing' them in towards the end". You can also animate along paths, 'animate' opacity etc.
Note that the idea behind Clutter isn't to produce 3D virtual worlds: more to use 3D effects to spice up a 2D UI - think Compiz, OS X effects etc.
Another bonus for when you are targetting embedded devices is that Clutter can do the time critical stuff using fixed-point arithmetic: important if you don't have an FPU.
The docs are a little sparse but are sufficient when used hand-in-hand with the demo code. The only other criticism I had was that some of the examples were out-of-sync with latest commits of the library itself but this may have been addressed in the 6 months or so since I played with Clutter.
It presents a very simple C API for building up 3D scenes using 2D objects (images, text etc.), hiding the complexities of OpenGL from you, as well as the differences between OpenGL-ES (as you are likely to find in the embedded world) and OpenGL proper (as you will find on your desktop PC). As well building up your scene, Clutter handles animation. You can say "rotate this group of objects 45 degrees around the Z axis in 2 seconds, 'easing' them in towards the end". You can also animate along paths, 'animate' opacity etc.
Note that the idea behind Clutter isn't to produce 3D virtual worlds: more to use 3D effects to spice up a 2D UI - think Compiz, OS X effects etc.
Another bonus for when you are targetting embedded devices is that Clutter can do the time critical stuff using fixed-point arithmetic: important if you don't have an FPU.
The docs are a little sparse but are sufficient when used hand-in-hand with the demo code. The only other criticism I had was that some of the examples were out-of-sync with latest commits of the library itself but this may have been addressed in the 6 months or so since I played with Clutter.
