Monthly Archives: September 2007

An introduction to pyclutter (part two)

Posted by on September 30th, 2007 4 comments

This tuto­r­ial is out­dated: it refers to ver­sion 0.4 of clut­ter that now is VERY old.

Last time we learned how to have our first stage drawn, so now it’s time to begin to insert some­thing into that stage.

Let do a sum­mary of what we are going to do in this “lesson”:

  • change the stage’s color
  • add a rectangle to the stage
  • add another rectangle to the stage

Read more »

An introduction to pyclutter (part one)

Posted by on September 23rd, 2007 11 comments

This tuto­r­ial is out­dated: it refers to ver­sion 0.4 of clut­ter that now is VERY old.

This tuto­r­ial is the first of a series that will try to learn to you how to use clut­ter with the help of python, or better: a tuto­r­ial about pyclutter.

But before to begin, it’s better to give an overview on what clut­ter is. Citing the clutter’s homepage:

Clut­ter is an open source soft­ware library for cre­at­ing fast, visu­ally rich and ani­mated graph­i­cal user inter­faces. Clut­ter uses OpenGL (and option­ally OpenGL ES) for ren­der­ing but with an API which hides the under­ly­ing GL com­plex­ity from the devel­oper. The Clut­ter API is intended to be easy to use, effi­cient and flex­i­ble.

That said, while clut­ter is the main library (writ­ten in C), there are bind­ings to other lan­guages like perl, vala, ruby, C# and python. The python bind­ing is com­monly named pyclutter.

The require­ments needed to better follow the tuto­r­ial are:

  • a good python knowledge (of course); if you don’t know it, you can always learn it by following the excellent dive into python
  • some basic knowledge of how the GTK environment works; although it isn’t really needed since we won’t use GTK functions, it is very useful since, under a certain point of view, clutter inherits many things from GTK
  • clutter 0.4.2 or newer

Read more »

About Clutter

Posted by on September 17th, 2007 No comments

About a week ago I dis­cov­ered the clut­ter project:

Clut­ter is an open source soft­ware library for cre­at­ing fast, visu­ally rich and ani­mated graph­i­cal user inter­faces.

Today, they released the 0.4.2 ver­sion, that’s mainly a bugfix release. With this release, you’ll find my (little) con­tri­bu­tion too. Give it a try, it’s a very inter­est­ing project.

When you’re a collector (and a programmer)

Posted by on September 14th, 2007 No comments

As above, when you’re both a col­lec­tor and a pro­gram­mer, strange things could happen. I’m a beer coaster col­lec­tor and my col­lec­tion now reached 250+ unique items so it became a bit a mess to keep that well organized.

So that’s why a devel­oped Beer­Coaster man­ager. Yes, I done a pro­gram that help me to keep my col­lec­tion orga­nized. It is still a bit rudi­men­tary but does its job pretty well. So, if you’re a beer coaster col­lec­tor like me, you’ll found this useful.

It’s writ­ten in Python and uses sqlite as data­base to store it’s infor­ma­tions, so it is portable across var­i­ous plat­forms (i.e.: you can copy & paste your files from Linux to Win­dows and it will keep working).

Cur­rently, it can be down­loaded only by SVN and it is every­thing but stable. I hope to release some­thing good within the end of year.

The project home­page is hosted on Google project: http://​bcman​ager.​google​code.com/

Get­ting it work­ing under Win­dows, cur­rently, is really hard: for the final releases, though, I should pro­vide a Win­dows installer.