Widget Animation in Linux

These days, widget animation in linux is quite hot. I summarized several approaches.

GTK + Clutter

Basic idea behind this approach is adding GTK widget as an Clutter Actor on Clutter Scene. Animation and transparency is done by Clutter. It is by virtue of GTK client side window, off screen rendering, supported from 2.18.x.

• The return of Client side windows
• Animating GTK+, Clutter-Gtk, client-side-windows and demos
• Design experience and demos in GTK and Clutter

Pixmap based animation in GTK

Comparing to the GTK+Clutter approach, it animates redirected widget in main event loop using cairo.

• Discussion at GTK Dev Mailing list: [1], [2]
• Bugzilla: pixmap based animation, timeline
• Demo video clips: [1], [2]

PAF aka PAF Animation Framework

However above two approaches are specific to GTK, PAF is aiming to create a more general framework. It provides a interface to change GObject values with given time function.

• GNOME PAF Project page
• Blog post

QT Animation Framework

QT also provides implicit animation framework from QT 4.x. Here are some introductory materials.

• Blog post with video clip
• Nokia: [1], [2]

Other References

• Quick Study of Existing Animation Systems
• Apple’s CoreAnimation