Clutter effects API provide a simplified abstraction for firing simple transitions from code. Clutter effects are created from a #ClutterEffectTemplate which is an abstraction of a timeline and an alpha function. An effect template can be created with:

ClutterEffectTemplate *etemplate =
  clutter_effect_template_new_for_duration (2000, CLUTTER_ALPHA_RAMP_INC);
  

This will create an effect template lasting 2000 milliseconds (2 seconds) and use an alpha function of %CLUTTER_ALPHA_RAMP_INC, there are other more advanced forms for creating effect templates from existing timelines, as well as attaching a callback to be called with user_data when the effect template is destroyed.

When we have an effect template we can create a temporary behaviour animating an actor simply by issuing:

clutter_effect_move (etemplate, actor, 23, 42, NULL, NULL);
  

and the actor will move from its current position to the coordinates (23, 42) in 2 seconds. Effects can also be stacked, so calling:

clutter_effect_move (etemplate, actor, 23, 42, NULL, NULL);
clutter_effect_fade (etemplate, actor, 0, NULL, NULL);
  

The actor will move and fade out at the same time.

Since effects return a #ClutterTimeline, you can stop an effect from immediatly happening by calling clutter_timeline_stop () on the returned timeline.

The timeline and all the effect infrastructure is unreferenced as soon as the timeline emits the ClutterTimeline::completed signal.