Clutter 1.10 Tool-Kit Begins To Take Shape

Among the interesting package updates for the latest GNOME 3.3/3.4 development update are some of the changes to Clutter and Cogl (the Clutter OpenGL component) in preparation for their version 1.10 releases.

Clutter 1.9.2 was released last week as the first post-1.8 development snapshot for what will eventually become Clutter 1.10. This new version has support for multi-backend builds with the ability to switch back-ends now being moved to run-time. The Clutter back-ends can be switched at run-tune by using an environmental variable (CLUTTER_BACKEND).

A new back-end to the Clutter 1.9/1.10 series is a GDK back-end, which uses the GNOME GDK API for creating drawing surfaces and receiving the windowing system/input events.

There's also improved Windows build support (for Microsoft Visual Studio 9 and Visual Studio 10), hint when ClutterText is in the password mode, ClutterStage has been deprecated, and many bug-fixes are present.

See the mail.gnome.org release announcement for Clutter 1.9.2.

Related to that is also the Cogl 1.9.2 release (its mailing list announcement) and it offers a new Cogl 2.0 API that is currently deemed experimental.