GTK+ Animation Framework and Clutter 2.0

Emmanuele Bassi lead this session. He opened the quick recap that the last GTK+ hackfest discussed adding an animation framework to GTK+ inspired by Clutter's. (This topic has been covered in blog posts on Planet GNOME.) He quickly, also, recapped his effort to port Clutter to the new GPeriodic clock so that GTK+ and Clutter share a single paint clock implementation. At minimum two features would be needed: the paint clock and a timeline.

Clutter has an animation framework. Emmanuele covered its features for the audience whom were mostly unfamiliar with it including a demo for audience members whom had questions about the difference between the Animator and new State engines. Owen wondered why they both exist; Emmanuele replied that they are not completely equivalent—in particular Animator is designed to use JSON to describe the animation.

Ryan Lortie, Owen Taylor, Benjamin Otte and Emmanuele had a long side discussion about the value of using JSON as an animation description language and, further, whether it makes sense to make full-blown JavaScript expressions to allow animation description to evaluate the scene to compute the final values. This branched out in to a discussion of what level of theme-based control makes sense: CSS? Expressions?

This side conversation turned out to be the crux of the entire path going forward: what level of control make sense for theme authors?

There were no conclusions from this session, at all. Only questions and questions wrapped in questions.