Nightwatch
February 29th, 2008, 05:39 AM
(Apologies if this is the wrong forum... I figured people here would be the most interested in this project. This library isn't exactly composite-aware at the moment, though it certainly can be in the future.)
I've started a project to write a free, open source equivalent of Apple's Core Animation library, developed first and foremost for Linux. Core Animation is a new framework in both Mac OS X Leopard and the iPhone that lets developers make fancy animated user interfaces. You can find Apple's usual hyperbolic marketing on it here (http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/coreanimation.html). It actually is a pretty cool technology: Apple's menu example shows a smoothly animated menu in less than 100 lines of code. From the iPhone examples I've seen, iTunes' Cover Flow can be done in just a few hundred.
I've named what I have so far Adamantium, following the tradition of naming Linux eye candy after minerals. ;) I've made a Launchpad site for the project (http://launchpad.net/adamantium) to host the code. It's at a very very early stage of development right now: I have a basic Cairo-based layer compositing engine in that mirrors Apple's API, but there isn't much to show at this point as far as animation goes. If there's interest, I plan to work on it more in the coming weeks and get something to show off.
I think it'd be cool to bring this technology to Linux, and I believe it'd complement Compiz well: we have a modern animated window manager, now we just need modern animated apps to go with it. What do you think?
I've started a project to write a free, open source equivalent of Apple's Core Animation library, developed first and foremost for Linux. Core Animation is a new framework in both Mac OS X Leopard and the iPhone that lets developers make fancy animated user interfaces. You can find Apple's usual hyperbolic marketing on it here (http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/coreanimation.html). It actually is a pretty cool technology: Apple's menu example shows a smoothly animated menu in less than 100 lines of code. From the iPhone examples I've seen, iTunes' Cover Flow can be done in just a few hundred.
I've named what I have so far Adamantium, following the tradition of naming Linux eye candy after minerals. ;) I've made a Launchpad site for the project (http://launchpad.net/adamantium) to host the code. It's at a very very early stage of development right now: I have a basic Cairo-based layer compositing engine in that mirrors Apple's API, but there isn't much to show at this point as far as animation goes. If there's interest, I plan to work on it more in the coming weeks and get something to show off.
I think it'd be cool to bring this technology to Linux, and I believe it'd complement Compiz well: we have a modern animated window manager, now we just need modern animated apps to go with it. What do you think?