Emmanuele Bassi

              ebassi@openedhand.com

# Overview

Clutter is a GObject based library for creating fast, visually rich, graphical user interfaces.

Clutter works by manipulating a scene-graph of 2D surfaces, or 'actors', inside a 3D space.

#ClutterActor is the base class for such surfaces. All #ClutterActors can be positioned, scaled and rotated in 3D space. In addition, other properties can be set, such as 2D clipping, children and opacity. Tranforms applied to a parent actor also apply to any children. Actors are also able to receive events.

Subclasses of #ClutterActor include #ClutterStage, #ClutterTexture, #ClutterText, #ClutterRectangle, #ClutterCairoTexture, #ClutterGroup and #ClutterBox. #ClutterActors are added to a parent, transformed and then made visible.

#ClutterStage is the top level #ClutterActor - it's the representation of a window, or framebuffer. It is created automatically when Clutter is initialised. #ClutterStage is a #ClutterGroup, a class implementing the #ClutterContainer interface.

Clutter allows explicit positioning and sizing through the #ClutterFixedLayout layout manager; and implicit positioning and sizing through fluid layout managers like #ClutterBoxLayout, #ClutterFlowLayout and #ClutterTableLayout. Actors inside fixed layout managers like #ClutterGroup and #ClutterStage can also be positioned and sized implicitly using the #ClutterConstraint sub-classes.

#ClutterTimelines provide the basis for Clutter's animation utilities. #ClutterActors can be animated using explicit animations through the various #ClutterBehaviour implementations, or implicit animations, through the clutter_actor_animate() function. Animations can also be defined as named states through the #ClutterState class.

Clutter further contains a number of utilities, including; #ClutterScript - for loading 'UI definition' files formatted in JSON; #ClutterShader - a class for applying GPU shaders to actors, #ClutterModel - a utility class for MVC list type implementations; #ClutterActions, #ClutterConstraints and #ClutterEffects.