A spoonful of “Sugar” for Brainstorm’s eStudio

We just came back from Brainstorm’s 12th User Conference, where we were demoing some of our Brainstorm-specific products, like the Chromakey plugin and the Web-browser plugin. But we also introducing a new python API to the Brainstorm flagship product eStudio (it’s an all-singing all-dancing 3d authoring software platform for making realtime graphics, largely for broadcast). There’s an intro and tutorial at http://cleverplugs.com/sugar. It will be a standard part of v12 of eStudio, but you can always ignore it and keep using the old API.

This new programming API is called “Sugar” (it’s a bit of ’syntactic sugar’ for eStudio) and it is an alternative to the existing python interface which is largely a port of much of the flat, string-based C-interface and doesn’t feel very friendly to Python programmers. The new interface enables a coding style which is more concise, more expressive (and so more readable) and, being object-orientated, allows use of quick python constructs. The net result should be faster and more accurate coding, and more complex scripts being attainable. At present it is not appropriate for real-time scripting (it is really intended for authoring and setup constructs), but there are plenty of optimizations possible – let us know what you think of it and where you’d like it to go.

Since the conference we’ve added a drag and drop sugar console to the sugar distribution and a button to translate the most commonly used code from the old API to the new one. We’ve also added a mailing list, so you can be kept informed of updates as they happen: sign up for sugar updates, or any other Clever Plugs mailing, at http://cleverplugs.com/news.html