tHeBloG

How am I involved with Beagle Board ? Here are the steps to find out: Go to Beagleboard Digi-Key training site . Browse into slide 13 (and while on it, read all juicy details about bb!) Spot "Clutter & Qt development" from there and compare it with my blog wordie output . That's how. Waiting for mine to arrive from UPS! Edit: OK, OK, those who want faster access, slide 13 with minor tips below.

So as expected, I gave Clutter 0.8 a little test drive. Literally... =) Going to add a bit more eye candy in there and push Clutter API further, we'll see what comes out. Currently the biggest problem is collision detection, tried to utilize: clutter_stage_get_actor_at_pos() - Separated road & background into own images/actors, but having a problem that clutter_stage_get_actor_at_pos() doesn't seem to ignore the transparent part of the image in picking. clutter_stage_read_pixels() - The RGBA color could be used to see if car is on grass (green) or on road (brown). But for some reason the outcome was not clear, even when making sure the pixel is taken next to car (not _from_ the car) and driving on top of a black&white chess board... Collisions to other cars etc. should not be a problem with clutter_stage_get_actor_at_pos() but what could be cleanest way to detect the track? Flash has hitTest for this.

The Wordle of this blog, thanks Carlos !

The 0.8 version of Clutter is coming out soonish from the excellent ohand people, containing again massive improvements ! I started to love Clutter when 0.2 was released ~1.5 years ago, it was just so easy to create functional & eye candy applications with its refreshingly clean API. All started with the question "How can one make effect [XYZ] using GTK+?" and after some pondering my answer was "You can't"... Of course these requested things would have been possible with Cairo (too low-level, hard & slow) and/or "just" forking GTK+ and adding ugly magic which would make it API&ABI incompatible with 2.x (no-no-no). After some studying Clutter appeared to be the best candidate for the job, and I had a lot of fun with it during 0.2-0.4 versions. Sadly GTK+ hasn't progressed much since then when it comes to GUIs, layouts & theming are quite static, timeline is not in, no native canvas etc. Luckily offscreen rendering is progressing ...

I'm waiting to get one of these in my hands! The Beagle Board is a low-cost, fan-less single-board computer based on Texas Instruments' OMAP35x device family, with all of the expandability of today's desktop machines, but without the bulk, expense, or noise.

I have always been a bit "late adopter" when it comes to upgrading into newer distro. As a Ubuntu user I switched my laptop into Hardy-time ~2 weeks ago, and for all you Lenovo T61 users: It's worth it! Currently I have no problems whatsoever, slight annoyances with Gutsy (wlan disconnects, screen brightness, HW-keys, suspend) are all working and haven't even found any regressions... =) So I can fully recommend T61 as a nice Linux/Ubuntu workhorse for everyone, check ThinkWiki for configuration tips on different distros. Now I'd need to make a clean install for desktop PC as upgrading it all the way from Breezy means it's not as sleek and clean as it could be... Not sure if I'm brave enough to test the Kubuntu KDE4 Remix -version Timo kindly offered, we'll see!

The reason why GtkPerf exists is that at that time I needed an easy tool to test the performance of GTK+ widgets & graphics. Mainly it was used to spot performance regressions and test how theme changes affected the performance, as well as different patches in GTK+. There has been some requests like this floating around: " Would you also make QtPerf, with similar widgets and features. This way it would be possible to make GTK+ vs. Qt testing... " Short answer: No A bit longer one: No, that would be bad and could lead into unneeded flamings Extensive answer: The actual result ( = score) of GtkPerf is quite meaningless as there are plenty of moving parts which affect to score. It would be totally possible to create similar application with Qt, using Qt widgets. But in wrong hands it could lead into "See, X-toolkit is faster than Y-toolkit, here are the results"-kind of things where X and Y can switch places based on the moon phase... So GtkPerf is mostly only us...