Clutter Tutorial

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been writing a Clutter tutorial for Openismus. Clutter is a “2.5D” canvas API maintained by OpenedHand.

Here you can see a preview of the tutorial, though some sections just have TODOs for now. I think it’s already the only place to find a useful description of Clutter Timelines, Effects and Behaviours and how they relate to each other, and it’s the only place that I’ve seen mention of how to manage the refcounting of the various objects. Thanks to the OpenedHand guys for answering my questions so patiently.

I’m waiting for the new high-level Clutter library to be created before completing the remaining sections, because the containers have already been moved out of the main clutter library, and that new library should have some interesting (but maybe not perfect at first) actors for doing scrolling and lists of text.

It’s DocBook, with some scripts to pull in the example code, in the clutter-tutorial module in OpenedHand’s svn repository:

As I’ve done in the past for gtkmm documentation, the examples are almost mind-numbingly simple so people have the best chance of seeing the use of the relevant API. However, there is one slightly more realistic full example. I hope that the containers in the new library will help me to make it prettier.

I guess you should report bugs in the tutorial in Clutter’s bugzilla, in the Documentation component.

9 thoughts on “Clutter Tutorial”

  2. Hi Murray,

    Looks very interesting.

    I just took a quick look at the document – while I see you explain each item in their own right (Stage/Actor/etc.) I think it would be good if there was a section at the start that simply provides an overview of how they all fit together.

    Also, for each example, it would be good if there was a link that pointed to a .c file that could be downloaded directly, rather than via cut-n-paste.

    Thanks,

    Dar.

  3. Dar wrote:
    > I think it would be good if there was a section at the start that simply provides an overview of how they all fit together.

    There is already the Introduction:
    http://www.openismus.com/misc/clutter_tutorial/docs/tutorial/html/ch01s02.html
    Would you like more detail there?

    > Also, for each example, it would be good if there was a link that pointed to a .c file that could be downloaded directly, rather than via cut-n-paste
    There is. Each Example section has a Source Code link. Please tell me if any example sections don’t have that.

  4. I think that the introduction needs more information – it mainly explains that Clutter is an API and it’s main features/benefits – about the only mention of the fact that there are stages and actors is the last line of the intro.

    A picture paints a thousand words – this might be a good way to go. I think that the important element would be to “show” how things fit together, or interact. I’m not really sure exactly *how* to do this though…

    As for the link to source code, my apologies, I somehow missed it. :(

  6. It would be nice if there was a downloadable/printable version of this tutorial. Would be very useful for someone like myself who doesn’t have regular net access.

  8. Just a two-cent suggestion. It would be helpful if you include the pkg-config flags needed to compile the examples inside the tutorial. Saves the time it takes to figure them out, especially if you’re not particularly used to programming GTK.

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